Chapter 4: The Pig Speaks and Animal Characteristics

In which we learn that Jimmy is proud of the fact that he is a pig and we learn the characteristics of each of the zodiac animals.

Talking Points

1. Many students (indeed, many adults!) are disappointed when their zodiac animal is not the one they would prefer to have. If this happens in your classroom, talk about the fact that no zodiac animal is without its positive points.

2. Talk about the zodiac signs that we find in our daily horoscopes. How are they different? How are they the same? Does our Western zodiac work on a 12-year cycle?

Activities

1. It could be interesting for your students to work in teams to interview their family members, or other students in other grades or teachers in your school, to find out some of their characteristics then guess their Chinese zodiac animal. After the animal has been predicted, the students can ask the person their birth year and see if they got it right.

2. Have students create posters or t-shirts for themselves, or even better, for someone else that illustrate things they’ve done that exemplify the characteristics of their animal. For example, those who are Monkeys are known for being able to solve problems: an illustration here might be that student holding up a math paper with 100% as a grade.

3. They can also copy the character for their animal onto their shirts. If you opt to do this, this would be the ideal time to talk about the Chinese writing system.

The Chinese Writing system is more than 4,000 years old. Each character is either an ideogram, meaning that it represents an idea, or a pictogram, meaning that it represents a thing. Chinese school children must learn about 100 characters a year until, when they graduate from high school, they know the more than 2500 characters they need to be able to read the newspaper.

Chinese characters are written using a strict stroke order and must be written the same way every time. To learn more about this, check out this lesson plan on Chinese writing