Every year, the AP Chinese III class does a traditional Siheyuan house model. Because of the enjoyment students have regarding the project, it has been introduced into other LOTE classes.
Year after year, Chinese Teacher Minning Wu improves the project via feedback from her students, learning how to make it better for them. Doing this project is a way for Wu to connect with her students, giving them an enjoyable project to complete and a common goal to work towards for all of her students. The students are limited to typical household resources, such as cardboard. The houses are intended to show what the inside and outside of those houses would look like.
“So when we are teaching language, we usually need to talk more about the culture,” Wu said. “So people are more open to the whole world and see differences, similar things like that. This project is about traditional architecture within the culture,”
The students of Wu’s class also enjoy this project. It allows them to be involved with the culture, and to get to know what traditional Chinese houses looked like, from the inside and the outside. She aimed to allow for maximum creativity on this project, a sort of controlled chaos that her students enjoyed.
“I think Mrs. Wu enjoys doing this project for the class as a way to see how everybody expresses themselves and how much they actually enjoy the class or the effort they are willing to put in,” sophomore Francesca Czarnecki said. “Because some people make mediocre projects, while others will, like, put in hours and hours,”
For the past decade, Mrs. Wu has been giving this project to the students. It allows for the most possible creativity and lets them have fun whilst doing the project. It allows the class to work together, helping each other out, and making sure everyone is on a good track with the project and has what they need.
“I enjoyed it a lot,” sophomore Grace Wong said. “It was stressful, but I definitely enjoyed just, like, hyper fixating on this one thing for hours at a time. I could watch stuff on the side. I also felt like it was a good bonding experience with my family as they helped me and stuff. So I really, really enjoyed the project.”
This class project in particular has received a lot of positive feedback from the students, and Mrs. Wu had ended up bringing an idea up to the LOTE department so they could do projects similar to her class’s project. Now, the Spanish classes have designed a similar project based on Latin American heritage, creating more traditional models based off of places in Latin America, like restaurants and farms.
“I wanted the kids to learn about important monuments in Latin America that define Latin America, for them to understand why it’s so special and how it fits into the culture and the history of the Spanish speaking world.” Spanish teacher Amy Aldrete said.
As more classes begin to start doing projects, teachers have noticed students are becoming more engaged with their LOTE class’s cultural architecture. These projects allow each student to create a model related to their LOTE class, encouraging creative expression.
“What I loved about this one is that it was sort of a final project that had to do with architecture,” Aldrete said. “They did a lot of reading, they did a lot of writing, they did a lot of other things and this was a final project and in a way it was a reward for having worked so hard on the more tedious tasks.”
