Learning Chinese Pinyin Finals

Hanyu Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Mandarin Chinese sounds into the Roman alphabet. Pinyin is considered useful for teaching Mandarin Chinese, transcribing names and places into the roman alphabet, as well as inputting Chinese characters into computers.

Here's a more complete introduction to Pinyin @ wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

Another useful online resource site of learning more about Pinyin: https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php

At our club meetings, we have been studying six basic, important "finals" in the past one month or two. They were: a, o, e, i, u, ü

There are a total of nearly 23 initials and 24 finals in Hanyu Pinyin system. We are taking baby steps by learning one at a time and trying our best to get them pronounced right! Some of them will be easy since we have the same or similar sound in English already; others may be more difficult and require much more practice. All club members are doing amazingly well and working hard in our Pinyin units. Way to go! Keep up your good work, kiddos!

 

 

Cooking Project: Making Chinese Dumplings 包饺子

饺子 (Jiao zi) is the word for dumplings in Chinese. This Tuesday, we had an opportunity of learning how to make jiaozi, using pre-made filling and store-sold dumpling skins, 饺子皮 (jiao zi pi). 

Before the hands-on wrapping, together we read Wikipedia entry on Jiaozi, learning about the history, origin, meaning and variety of jiaozi in Chinese culture.  We also watched pictures of Jiao zi yan, dumpling banquet, and got inspired by all those colorful and different shapes of jiao zi.  Therefore, when its our own turn of making them, we were able to be so creative that you may not be able to recognize what we are actually making! Just kidding. ; )  Actually, we did an amazing job of making jiao zi, considering it's our very first time of doing this. It seems a fairly easy task for the most part, if we are not doing any fancy seal. 

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However, I have to admit that this was just a simplified version of making jiaozi. If you'd like to try it from scratch, here's some step-by-step instruction online that looks pretty thorough on this topic:

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/tour/food/chinese-cooking/dumpling.htm 

I hope you enjoyed not only making them at school but also cooking and eating jiao zi at home! I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback on Thursday!

 

 

 

 

Cooking Project - Boba Milk Tea (珍珠奶茶 zhen zhu nai cha)

It has been a while since some club members asked for a cooking project; therefore I thought of a DIY of Boba tea not a long ago. Here you go... finally we got a chance to do it in April!

Ideally, we need to boil the boba, or black tapioca pearls (hei zhen zhu 黑珍珠), right before making the tea. However, I had to get it ready way before hand (the night before our class day) due to the tight schedule of our class, as well as my day. The result thought, is not bad at all. We added boiling water to "wake up" the refrigerated bobas on Tue and fortunately enough, they still taste good! 

During the class time, we made different flavors of teas (茶 cha),  added the boba, milk (奶 nai) and sugar/honey (糖tang／蜂蜜 feng mi). I'm sorry one of the students missed this project due to sickness; if we all are interested in doing it again, we may redo it in the future. 

In fact, we were able to make more than what we can consume and shared many cups with our dear school teachers and administrators. Everyone tasted it seemed liked it and some were surprised to know how easy a DIY boba tea could be! 

Here are some pictures I took throughout this project:

Some afterwards thoughts. It has been widely believed that the boba tea is an invention of the Taiwanese in the 1980s. I remember drinking and craving for them nearly twenty years ago when I was in college in Shanghai, in the 1990s. It was one of the most popular beverages on campus (and probably still is). The cost of one cup, then, was ¥2 RMB, about 30 cents in USD. But nowadays, in Davis California, the average cost is over $3 dollars per small cup. If you love it, and know how to make it in your own kitchen, I bet you gonna save some money on this. ;-) 

For detailed recipes, please google "Babo Tea"online; here is one of the search results of mine:

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-boba-and-bubble-tea-98067

Or, there are also videos out there to show you how....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8Vr9wpWnE

Have fun making zhen zhu nai cha and enjoy it!!!

Asian Grocery Store Visit Field Trip

On April 4th, we went to 99 Ranch Market store for Chinese food grocery shopping and tasting. Thanks for all the parents who supported us and made this field trip possible! I hope you all enjoyed the lunch there and the groceries that you brought home. Now you know the place; please feel free to explore more authentic (or close to authentic) Chinese food on your own. 

After the field trip, we spent one class discussing, drawing and writing about our impression of this field trip, especially the "exotic" food items we discovered in the store. 

Fruit Song Video Online 水果歌

Here you go, another fun song you've accomplished! What a good job, everyone! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDjYwJlFICA

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.