A Cultural Event

Here at Emanate our student families are very important to us.  We know that there will be many adjustments for our families moving overseas.  I have invested a lot of time and energy  in coming up with different activites to help prepare them to enter a new culture.  Since children can't sit too long without being bored, I try to make the activites I do fun and interactive. Today we celebrated Chinese New Years.  Through the celebration we start to introduce the children to a different culture and way of doing things.  Through sight, sound, and taste we explore some of the Chinese culture.  We found China on the globe, and tried to read signs in Chinese.  Then we heard Chinese music, songs, practiced a Chinese greeting, and read a story about Chinese New Years.  We learned some culture as we watched a lion and then dragon dance.  To see how good everyone could use chop sticks, we had a race of the parents against the children.  They tried to see who could fill their jars with marshmallows first.  (The race might have been rigged as the children had bigger marshmallows and a smaller jar to fill.  But the parents were good sports about the competition.)  We finished off our Chinese cultural event by eating some Chinese food with chicken fried rice, egg rolls, fortune cookies, and rice krispy suchi.  (Thanks Joan, Charis, and Vern for helping me with the food prep as all of the food was home made. It was great team work!) I was surprised how well everyone did using chop sticks.  Our Chinese New Year event was a fun way to start to explore a new culture.