​​​TashaDavis​

In my Chinese class, we were learning the titles of our family members in Chinese by creating a family tree of sorts. We had already learned how to introduce ourselves and how many people were in our families, so we needed to learn what to call our family members. During this project I grew in learning to make use of previous projects I have completed. Before this project, I used to approach everything with a clean slated mind. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that luxury during this project. When this project was given to us, we were told that we had to make a PowerPoint to introduce ourselves, our family members, everyone’s age and job, and have an image of the family member. We were only given two school days to complete this project.

 

This project helped me to grow in time management by teaching me to utilize the resources that I had at my disposal, in the short amount of time that I had been given. I realize now that it shouldn’t have felt like such a big thing, but it did. Like all of my Chinese projects, we learn the material first and then make a project to prove what we have learned.

 

In this family tree project, one thing that supported my growth of learning to use things that I had available to me, was that I saw something similar to the project I was currently working on that I had done before in last year’s Chinese class. It was a PowerPoint of my family tree, but of just my immediate family and without the new vocabulary that I had been learning in this year’s class. It already had several aspects that I needed to have in the final product of the project. By taking a similar project and just modifying it to fit the requirements of the current class and assignment, I was able to cut the time it would have taken to do the project in half.

 

My class made a family tree presentation and then translate it into Chinese. We had to create a slide for each one of our 10 family members (some of them don't exist). This translation project helped to cement some of the sets of words in our minds and to make use of them so that we wouldn't forget them.

 

During this project, we used a lot of the words we had been learning for a few weeks.  That included things like the different titles that family members have, different jobs, and also a few describing words that we learned during the project itself.

 

In my final project, you can definitely see that I learned several characters, and their are some that I have learned to the point of complete memorization where I didn't even have to look at the Pinyin. Pinyin is the way that a Chinese character is pronounced.

One way that I overcame the complete lack of time, was that I used a Presentation from last year's family tree project. It was also in Chinese but only had 4 of the needed 10 slides. It also was missing the job titles and the discription of family members but it was a huge jumpstart. I don't have 10 family members, so it was also like writing a story at the same time. I am so glad that I sent last year’s presentation to my email before I turned it in. From now on, I will be far more diligent in backing up my work so I can use it to remind what I have already learned. That way I can use it again.

 

My use of my PowerPoint from last year’s family tree shows how I took a stressful, time-constrained situation, and used what I have done in the past to get through. I had to ask myself how I might be able to make a well crafted presentation in a shorter amount of time so I could meet the deadline, and this was the answer. It also is a good comparison to show how much more I have learned since last year.

 

I think that the biggest problem was that we only had a weekend and two days to do this project. It was sort of popped on us the Friday before the last week of school. We had the weekend, Monday, and Tuesday to work on it. Actually, we were supposed to have just the weekend and Monday to work on it, and then Tuesday and Wednesday would be for presenting. This was changed because several (the majority) students objected quite strongly to the small amount of time alloted to us. In the end, we got an extra day to work on it.

 

I think that where I grew most was not learning the new words, but instead learning to look back on things that I have done in the past, and use what I already have to do well in the present. This project was definitely stressful. Making due with what I had is where I grew most.