A primary five class from St John’s Primary in Ayr recently took on something of a challenge: the children and their teacher set out to learn a new language in just four weeks. Using Radio Lingua podcasts, the children learned a few phrases each day, then put their new language skills to the test by creating stop-frame animations in Mandarin Chinese.

Radio Lingua Schools Director Mark Pentleton visited the class at the beginning of the project and started the project off with the first lesson of the Radio Lingua One Minute Mandarin course. Using the interactive whiteboard to display the enhanced podcasts, the children began their first steps in Mandarin, learning to say nǐ hǎo 你好 (hello) and they were able to say zài jiàn 再见 (goodbye) to Mark before he left them to work through the ten lessons of the course over the next four weeks.

The language covered in One Minute Mandarin (and indeed in all the One Minute Languages courses) includes basic greetings, saying that you speak a little of the language, counting, introducing yourself and asking other people their names, asking “how are you?” and providing suitable answers. Since each lesson lasts just a couple of minutes, the pupils and their teacher were able to spend just five minutes a day on learning Mandarin. Since the materials were also available online, some of the pupils were able to download the audio lessons at home and practise the words and phrases in their own time.

By week four, the pupils were ready to start planning the next stage of the project. The pupils were organised into small groups and, based on the words and phrases they’d learned within the course, each group was challenged to invent a story and write a script entirely in Mandarin. The children came up with some excellent ideas including using the numbers they had learned to start off a game of hide and seek, or to count down to the New Year. Each group also had to choose a different environment in which to set their story, from under the sea to lunar landscapes. The children rehearsed their scripts with the class teacher in role plays, practising the pronunciation of the words and phrases they had learned. Having completed their scripts, the groups then set about making their plasticine models which would ultimately come to life in the animation.

The next stage of the project was a two-day workshop with Mark. The pupils learned to use I Can Animate software and created their stop-motion movie frame by frame. Each group completed the animation element and then imported the footage into iMovie where they added titles and transitions. They then exported the video to Garageband where they recorded the voiceovers – in Mandarin.

No movie-making project is complete without the world première event, so the pupils invited their parents into school and during the final afternoon they presented their work to the rest of the school and to their parents.

As an interdisciplinary project, this project allowed the children involved to experience many areas of the curriculum:

• language skills – learning a language through innovative methods despite no in-school capacity for the teaching of Mandarin Chinese;
• literacy – developing scripts based on the newly acquired language and inventing imaginative ways to include that language within their story;
• art – creating backgrounds and plasticine characters to use in their animations;
• drama – practising their scripts and pronunciation through role plays;
• numeracy – learning about frames and timecodes for planning their animations;
• ICT – acquiring new technology skills in animation, video production and sound recording.

In addition the pupils involved worked collaboratively on the project, building their confidence and interpersonal skills, and shared their learning with the school and wider community through the final presentation.

The pupils’ work can be seen in our media gallery:

• In the Jungle – yī èr sān sì wǔ (一二三四五)
• Volcano Land – wǒ huì shuō pǔ tōng huà (我会说普通话)
• Under the Sea – hěn gāo xìng jiàn dào nǐ (很高兴见到你)
• Desert Island – shēng rì kuài lè (生日快乐)
• Ghoul House – hěn gāo xìng jiàn dào nǐ (很高兴见到你)
• On the Moon – xīn nián kuài lè (新年快乐)

If you would like to find out more about running a Radio Lingua Schools workshop in your school, please visit our Workshops area.

The One Minute Languages courses are currently available in Catalan, Danish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.