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Grades 5-6: Using Brush and Ink to Write The Beauty of Chinese Characters

December 28, 2017

Grades 5-6: Using Brush and Ink to Write The Beauty of Chinese Characters

In daily teaching, we often hear students to say Chinese is difficult to learn. They especially stress how difficult it is to write Chinese characters. Chinese characters are composed of strokes, which are very different from the letters of the alphabet.

For students used to writing Latin characters, writing in Chinese can be tricky. These kids usually write up to down, left to right, which can lead to confusion. There’s also the problem that with just the smallest modification or error, one Chinese character can turn into an entirely different character with an entirely different meaning!

Chinese characters have a long history, and each carries a little piece of culture within it. SHSID’s teacher of Non-Native Level Chinese classes have some challenges to overcome: how to make students better understand Chinese characters, how to help them understand the subtleties of Chinese characters, and how to alleviate their fear of learning and writing Chinese characters.

This year's Chinese Culture Week is different from the previous. Grade 5-6’s Non-Native Level Chinese teachers focused the beauty of Chinese characters, using brushes and ink to copy the characters, or even turn them into pictures. It is really a novel feeling to writer and painting on traditional fan-shaped paper, and lens paper. Teachers introduced historical evolution of Chinese characters so that students can learn the correct writing postures, and so on.

Grade 6 Non-Native Level 3 students led by Ms Lijiao Tian started from the simplest point, horizontal strokes, to try some slightly complicated Chinese characters andwrite their own names, then create their own works on lens paper, then add their own ginkgo leaf picked up on campus to decorate the paper.

As soon as the work was completed, the students felt a great sense of accomplishment. When the students wrote a stroke seriously, felt more at ease with the character at hand, and characters in general. Although it was the first time that many students wrote using a brush, they felt interested.

One said: "It is very difficult to write in a brush, but it’s very interesting."

Some of students also said they would like to bring a few of their works back home.

The students are very interested in the activities of Chinese Culture Week, which entertains and fuses culture into classroom teaching. They now not only know the basic history of Chinese characters’ evolution, but also understand that the stroke ’composition of Chinese characters is meaningful. We hope students can learn Chinese more easily and love Chinese more after experiencing the beauty of writing Chinese characters.

(Written by Ms. Lijiao Tian Ms.Chen Liu Pictures by Ms. Lijiao Tian, Ms.Chen Liu)