March Activities Review: From Lantern Festival To Chinese Food And More...

In March, we were introduced to one of the major Chinese traditional holidays: Lantern Festival, or Yuan Xiao Jie, as the last day of Chinese New Year celebration. We played Chinese and English riddles and learned the cultural facts about this holiday. We also had outside guests coming to our school to do a presentation on this holiday and tasted the sweet rice dumplings they brought to us and made craft lanterns.

Since the Chinese New Year celebration involves lots, and lots, of food -- traditional Chinese snacks, special dishes for the holidays, etc. We naturally wanted to explore more on this topic. The students suggested to have a regular, ideally weekly, schedule of "Chinese Food Tasting." So now we have Tuesdays as the day, where we may get to try different snacks that are rarely available in regular grocery stores but are popular in Chinese culture. One of the students also suggested that we may talk about the "cultural facts" of this snack each time, besides learning its name.  What a great idea!  As the instructor, now I see that this food tasting activity is gradually shifting from something "just for fun" to more "educational"  and is developing its into part of our formal "curriculum." Thanks for your thoughtful and wonderful input, club members!

Towards the end of March, we started learning a currently-super-popular Chinese street dance: 小苹果（Little Apple）.  At beginning, the kids were a little shy and intimidated by the song (the lyrics are long and complex). But as we practice more each week, they got the hang of it and started really enjoying the dance! I know there's a group of Picnic Day participants who will perform the same dance/song on this Saturday (4/18) at the parade. So I encouraged my club members to join them if they could, on this coming Saturday. I'm sure they will have lots of fun if they can make it!

Fruits

Lately, we started learning about Fruits (shui guo). The basic vocabulary we introduced are: 苹果（apple）、梨子（pear）、西瓜（watermelon）、桔子（orange）、草莓（strawberry）、葡萄（grape）、桃子（peach）、菠萝（pineapple）、香蕉（banana）、and 樱桃（cherry）.

To help students memorize those new words, we "put" them on our body and had fun playing games with them. For example, we put apples on the head, strawberries hanging on ears, orange on nose, grapes in eyes, peaches in mouth, pineapple on arms and bananas on our figures! Of course, pretending. ; ) That way, in one of the games, we can touch a body part and say the name of that fruit out aloud!

 

We also made a booklet titled "All Kinds Of Fruits / 各种各样的水果", which has only four pages but makes a lovely, rhythmic poem.  On the last page of this booklet, we shared our favorite fruits by drawing them on that page. We'll learn a song to go with those words later on as well. 

Our 1st Field Trip --- San Francisco annual Chinese New Year Parade

We had our very first field trip to San Francisco on the March 7th for the annual Chinese New Year Parade. It was fun to witness this event together with all our club members (and their supportive families)! Thank you for all the parents who put effort into this and made it happen! I can 's say enough how much your support is appreciated!  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a group picture with you guys.  :(   Please remind me to at least take one group picture when we do our future field trips, as a way to preserve our beautiful memories and to document our life-experience learning.  

Here I can only share some pictures that I took that evening, about what we saw...... Enjoy them! (Please share with me if you have some good ones, especially the ones with any of "us" in it. ~_^)

After this field trip, some of the kids were so excited seeing the lion dance and the dragon teams that they were proposing at one of our club meetings: "Can we make our own lion costume?  That looks really cool." I have to agree; it is really cool. Although we had no experience making stuff like that before, it's not a bad idea to try new things, right? I actually liked this idea and the students' passion behind it. I'll definitely keep that in my mind/agenda, and with this group of kids, I'm sure we can try this DIY craft project in the near future.