How much can one learn about the Chinese language and.
its history in eight weeks?

Not much, but it’s a good beginning.
As the responsible party who must pull this off,
I truly enjoyed doing it, and I think the class and I
DID PULL IT OFF!!!
We began by identifying the origins of a few basic pictograms and sounded the pronunciation.
We sang them in tonal levels;
Then, we collected ideograms.
We looked for the radicals and the roots;
We followed the strokes and counted them;
Then we made short phrases until we had long phrases.
We used calligraphy brushes and created graphs and words with ink.
The beautiful end result of our eight weeks of hard work emerged when we had our final class presentation.
Nick Shaw made a sculpture of Qin Shi Huang;
And talked about this famous emperor who built the Great Wall;
Geoff Shaw made a pencil drawing of a warrior scholar moving a huge calligraphy brush in the mountain;
Jessica Grimes made colorful designs in her Chinese vocabulary flash cards;
Kathleen Woodall created a poem with her Chinese vocabulary
Leigh Lauck and Chris Sherwood copied Chinese poetry in brush calligraphy work.
Tina Martinez and Mandy Gonzales created day to day conversations in Chinese dialogue.
Michael Janerelli played the bamboo flute and demonstrated brush calligraphy work.
Dale Trujillo research on Chinese poetry and treated us to a delicious platter of Susi.
Not bad for a short eight weeks, huh?
You Bet-Ya!!!

HEN HAO, HEN HAO, XIE XIE DA JIA!
(VERY GOOD, VERY GOOD, THANKS TO ALL)