Celebrating Chinese New Year

We don't do many Chinese cultural traditions around here. I cook Chinese food maybe once a week sometimes not at all in a single week, and when I do, we don't even use chopsticks! Maybe it's a product of being raised here in the US; the cultural traditions become more and more diluted the longer people are away from the origins of those traditions.

Every now and then though, there are occasions that prompt me to bring back some traditions, and be purposeful in sharing them with the kids. I want them to know their heritage and have memories of Chinese traditions, even as a half-Asian.

Most of our closest friends are Asian (is that coincidence? is that my own tendency to lean toward common experiences in choosing my friends? and if so, why doesn't my husband have his own tendency toward Caucasian friends? ), and they are in the same 2nd-generation-boat that we're in...grew up here in the US, sprinkling a few Asian traditions in here and there.  We don't sit around talking about Asian-American issues or send our kids to Chinese school, but we DO like to celebrate Chinese New Year together, reliving fond memories from our own childhoods.

Making dumplings as a group is a memory I specifically wanted to pass down to my kids. I remember family gatherings where my parents and the my aunts and uncles would all work together to make lots and lots of dumplings together. They always asked us to help, and occasionally we did, making funny-shaped dumplings, laughing at our awfully mis-shapen results, and then we'd run off and play with the other kids.  It was like history repeating it self when our group of kids do the same thing...but over the years, they are getting more proficient at making dumplings.

We used food.com's Asian Pork and Cabbage Dumpling Recipe for the filling, and my dad's dough recipe, which is 6 cups flour, 2 1/2 cups water, 1/2 tsp salt (knead together until thoroughly mixed and workable). 

We also had a hot pot, with plenty of meat, fish balls, seafood, and noodles, which is another favorite tradition of mine. 

For dessert, we had a huge assortment of Asian treats-egg tarts, pineapple cake, rice cake ('nian gao') in 2 flavors, almond jello, oranges, and sponge cake (not sure that was specifically Asian, but it's reminiscent of the lighter, fluffier cakes that are common in Chinese bakeries)!

Weekly Wrap-up: Aerodynamics and Chinese New Year

We took a break from Ancient History and did a unit on aerodynamics this week. I don't have a science curriculum we are following, I'm just going with topics that Monkey has expressed an interest in. So for any topic, I take out books from the library, look up videos on line, and do web searches for other ideas homeschoolers used for that topics, sometimes using lapbooks, or experiments, etc. I don't know how people homeschooled before the internet age!

Unfortunately, aerodynamics wasn't such a common homeschool topic for elementary-aged kids... There was a lot about airplanes and flight, so I used some of that, but Monkey wasn't so much into types of airplanes or the history of flight, he was mostly interested in the science of it, but a lot of the stuff I found on aerodynamics was too advanced, so I had to piece together an assortment of ideas. We ended up using a  Bill Nye video on Flight, some books from the library (including Up, Up, and Away: The Science of Flight, Aerospace Engineering and the Principles of Flight) and did some demos/experiments on Bernoulli's principle.

Of course, making paper airplanes and experimenting with how they flew based on wing shape/size was part of our hands-on learning, and boy, did they have fun with this! They got quite a collection of paper airplanes(this is less than half of what they made):

Because Chinese New Year was this past week, we also decided to add that to our studies. This was very last minute but I pulled together this Chinese New Year unit study. I'll have to plan more in advance next year. These are the decorations they made for the house, as I reviewed the names of the animals in Chinese and introduced them to the written characters (so far, most of our Chinese lessons have only covered speaking/listening, not writing/reading). They drew pictures of animals, but not using the 'how to draw' link from what I planned for the unit study:

We also made homemade dumplings, one of the traditional foods eaten for the New Year celebration, on New Year's Eve:

Last Minute Chinese New Year Unit Study

Well, Chinese New Year is suddenly upon us, faster than I realized.

I wanted to include the holiday as part of our homeschool studies, but wasn't on top of things the past couple weeks, and now here we are, the new year almost upon us, and I'm scrambling to pull something together.

I stopped by the library today to see if I could pick up some books, but there was only 1 book left about Chinese New Year! (This is what happens when I wait until the last minute to get materials!) Thank God for the internet, though!

So, on super short notice, this is what I came up with, covering social studies, math, science, cooking, foreign language and art.

• Discovering China - Chinese New Year Video: 

•  The Emperor Who Built the Great Wall - e-Book by Jillian Lin(mention in my previous post), that tells the history of the first Emporor of China (and how China got its name).  Available on Amazon for $2.99, but for the first 2 days of the new lunar new year, February 19-20, it will be free! 

• Western and Chinese New Year's Celebrations  - This was the only book left at the local library about Chinese New Year. It's got way more than Chinese New Year, but we'll read the parts that are relevant, and maybe also inspired to find out how other cultures celebrate their new years.

• Symbolism of traditional Chinese New Year foods  - Great summary of traditional food items eaten for Chinese New Year celebrations.

• Homemade dumplings (this is a basic pork filling, but uses pre-made wrappers), with homemade wrappers with my dad's dough recipe. We'll tie in math here, probably making a 2/3 or 1/2 portion of this recipe:

6 cups flour

2 ½ cups water

½ tsp salt

Mix, let sit, knead some more. Using a Kitchen-Aid mixer with dough hook makes this super easy! 

Here's a video that includes how to make the dough.

• Chinese zodiac animals video - Overview of Chinese beliefs about the zodiac.

• Draw Chinese zodiac animals - Cute Step-by-Step printouts for art and foreign language, I'll have the kids label them with the Chinese words for each animal.

• Chinese lunisolar calendar video  - Cartoon that talks about lunar and solar calendars that the Chinese use, this is a brief overview. 

• Chinese calendar - This is a more in-depth description of the Chinese lunisolar calendar, but alot of this will be too complex. To incorporate science,  I'll focus on the orbit of the moon, the solstices and equinoxes, and tilt of the earth in relation to seasons. 

And of course, lucky money in red envelopes for the kids!