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！”