African Harvest Celebrations

I want to thank everyone that participated in our first event if the year. We had a great turn out with schools represented from Oakland, San Francisco and the Peninsula. We had students from Pre-K to 5th grade. Thank you to Tian-Qian Laoshi for an incredible job with the Mandarin Instruction.

The children learned about the Yam Festival in Ghana and Nigeria. We discussed why cultures have celebrated harvests. The children made crafts and reviewed Chinese vocabulary for corn, drums, yams, Africa and harvest.

In celebrating our culture the children all gave thanks ” Ashe” for our symbolic harvest.

The children created kente cloth patterns.

We ended the event with Alexandra (grade 5) reading to the younger children in Mandarin!!!

It was a wonderful event.

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Our next trip will be to the pumpkin patch and we are looking at ways to update our lesson plans to include what we learned from today.

A few changes you can expect
– the older children will practice reading and writing Chinese characters.
– the older children will read a story to the younger children.
– we will break into smaller age appropriate groups to encourage older youths to participate.
– we will have 60 min of Mandarin led play.

We are continuously seeking Mandarin Instructors, older youth participants, and increased parent involvement.

Thanks for such a great showing and wonderful feedback at the end. Stay posted for more information to come.

Have a great weekend.