Chinese Treasure Chest is an unprecedented collection of ready to-use games, songs, craft projects, delightfully illustrated student worksheets and teacher-directed activities to help pre-school and elementary students learn Chinese as a foreign language. It offers a wide variety of activities of different difficulty levels to facilitate differentiated instruction in mixed-ability classrooms and across grade levels.

This second edition of Chinese Treasure Chest is a valuable resource that every Chinese teacher can use to enhance your lessons. Our new and past users will discover a treasure trove of fun, meaningful, content-related lessons through which students can learn Chinese and develop an appreciation for the Chinese culture. This two-volume teaching resource contains over 700 ready-to-use games, songs, craft projects, attractively illustrated worksheets, and teacher-directed activities designed around themes in the elementary curriculum. It is organized into 12 monthly sections to fit the school year. Each section begins with teacher notes that state the learning objectives and difficulty level of each activity, and offer suggestions on how to implement an activity to get the best results. Students learn the Chinese language and culture through games, songs, crossword puzzles, cut-outs, picture cards, TPR activities, role-play, chants and conversations. Also included are seasonal activities to help students celebrate special events and holidays of each month (e.g., Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, and Dragon Boat Festival).

Some of the significant improvements in the second edition of Chinese Treasure Chest include:
Revised teacher notes that provide useful teaching strategies and suggestions;
Exciting new activities, worksheets, songs and rhymes to complement the most popular ones from our original series, such as adding a new song and a rhyme for the 12 zodiac animals, activities on making food bowls and plates, and including a times table for advanced learners;
Updated content to reflect current culture, such as replacing the flip phone activity with a smartphone, replacing Yao Ming with Jeremy Lin, adding Youyou Tu and updating Elaine Chao to the lesson about famous Chinese women;
Additional Chinese New Year worksheets, projects and songs that your students will love;
New project samples of recent student work.
Cross references to contents in our upcoming Volumes 3 and 4 that will provide teachers with an abundance of additional materials about related themes;
12 full-color posters that teachers can download for use in the classroom. Poster images include 10 of the themes from the calendar pages, the map of China and classroom commands. Visit cengagechinese.com to access these materials.

The second edition also introduces two adorable mascots — big brother dragon (龙哥哥) and little sister dragon (龙妹妹). As the most emblematic symbol of China, dragons represent power, strength and good fortune in Chinese culture. Using dragon images for the mascots allows students to embrace this aspect of Chinese culture. The mascots appear on the cover and throughout the book. Color copies of the mascots are available on Cengage Learning website (cengagechinese.com) for teachers to copy and use as puppets in the classroom.