Day 5: Let's Have Some Dim Sum!

Food is such an important component of Chinese culture; our camp would not be complete without tasting some authentic Chinese food.

Starting from day one, we brought traditional popular Chinese snacks to the classroom: brown sugar mochi, Chinese hawthorn flakes（山楂片）, roasted duck, fried dry mushrooms, spiced bean curd （豆腐干), etc. Some children were really open-minded and tried everything! Of course, not all of them liked everything they tried. But we hope this expose them to some authentic "Chinese flavors" anyway.  

And today is our Food day. We were making Dim Sum (点心) fake and real! At the morning circle, we read a children's story book "Dim Sum for Everyone" and talked about the origin of the word, "Dim Sum." It is the Cantonese version of the Chinese phrase: touch (点) your heart (心). In mandarin, we say: dian xin, for the exactly same two characters.

At activity time, we have students working on three different projects in two rooms: one group using ultra-light play dough to make pretended dim sums; another using rice powder and some sweet stuffing to make real, eatable dim sum (which can be called different names in Chinese depending on the stuffing and finishing coating); the third in the art room painting on a Chinese fan that they get to keep after camp. We should have anticipated how messy those three activities could get, especially the real cooking one. If we had a choice, we probably would not choose to do it on the last day of our camp. But we went ahead and did them all! The students had fun; older campers, TAs and teachers had some extra cleanup. Problem solved. ;) 

We have learned throughout this week our Chinese names (many of the students now can write their own), count (read and write for some) numbers in Chinese, an antient Chinese poem with music and gongfu performance, and many other things here and there. Here's an online video of the kids doing the poem/gongfu performance (if you have any concern of showing this online in public, please let us know and we can put some watching restrictions on the clip): 

http://youtu.be/C5nNutGMJlw

At the closing circle, when asked what is something new they learned this week, the students responsed: 

- I learned how to write my Chinese name. (Juna, Austin, Zachary) 

- I learned how to make Tang-yuan (rice dumpling). (Mia)

- I learned how to use the abacus. (Naomi, Leo, Abby, Maceo, Andrew L. )

- I learned how to speak Chinese! (Ben, Abby)

- I learned numbers in Chinese (Anna)

- I learned Chinese use symbols, different than English. (Sophia) 

- There are Chinese symbols that mean something. ( Aavash) 

As the teachers, our deepest gratitude has to go to all the volunteers and interns who help us out everyday in the classroom, the administrators who supported us in many ways, and all the students who were here and eager to learn! We really had a great time this week, working together, to make this new camp a wonderful reality! 

Although our camp is to the end, we felt our friendship between each other and our enthusiasm in learning Chinese language and culture have just begun.  It's too soon to say goodbye. But like our closing song goes, "we'll see you again! 我们还会再见！” 

Day 4: Water and Ink Painting

Today's camp theme was Chinese Shui-mo (水墨）painting, also known as Water and Ink painting. It is one of the oldest continuous artistic tradition in the world, and done with a brush dipped in black or colored ink. Actually, we have been preparing for today's activity from the first day, on Monday, by letting the kids practicing their brush techniques using clear water without ink. Before they started painting with real ink, we first read the story "Little Tapoles Looking for Their Mother" in English, then watched the 100% Chinese (you'll understand why I say it's purely Chinese if you take a look of it) cartoon show of this story. Here's the online link to the movie:

http://youtu.be/2qScNN9ePZE

It's made in the 1970s, purely done by beautiful shui-mo paintings. Before watching the movie, one of the students, a 5 and half years old, asked me: Why you call it beautiful? How can a water and ink painting be beautiful? After watching it and finishing the whole day, at the closing circle, the same child made a comment: "I didn't know water and ink paintings can be beautiful before; but now I knew IT IS" That was such a sweet comment! Hope you all enjoyed it! 

At the painting activity, I requested the students to drew at least one black and white shui-mo painting about the movie they watched this morning; most of them did. Below are displays of their work from the art room today, including some free painting and calligraphy. 

Children are true artists. They really are, especially when engaged in this type of freehand painting style ("xie yi" 写意), as opposed to Western style of realistic ("xie shi" 写实) painting.  Here are more pictures of artists at work: 

Meanwhile, there are other learning and fun activities going on in-and-outside of the classroom:

Thanks for the TAs and intern teacher, for their dedicated support to our classroom! The students were surely benefited from them being around and available! Also, we are grateful to the older kids who were kind and smart enough to be the teachers' helpers at many occasions! This is such a good team. We have been truly enjoying our camp days so far. It's going to be sad to say good-bye tomorrow......