We will read ‘The Pet Dragon’ by Christoph Niemann this week, as requested from one of our students 🙂 It is a lovely book to introduce Chinese characters through clever illustrations.

We might see if we can be just as clever and make some of these characters with our bodies, on our own or as a team 🙂 Here is the illustration for 上下 in our book.

And here are our kids making them with their bodies:

We sing lots of songs that have 上 (shàng) ‘up/above/over etc.’ and 下 (xià) ‘down/below/under etc.’ in them. A good song and video to keep watching for ‘Up/Down’  is the Groovi Pauli ‘Going Up Going Down’ song, which you can watch by clicking on the song name! And don’t forget our ‘Where is the teacher?’ song that has ‘Up there’ and ‘Down there’ in it.  We move our shoulders ‘Up and down’ in our Clap hands song.  Our ‘London Bridge’ activity too has ‘falling DOWN’ in there.  And our Jelly Fish song has Up/Down in it! Here is a video I forgot I had of my kids a couple of friends singing this a few years back! You can watch it here but click on the London Bridge link for more details and lyrics of the song. There are no excuses for getting our 上 and 下 mixed up 🙂

So come along for some kinesthetic character learning fun!