Little Dragon Summer Camp (8/19-8/23)

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Our first week of the Little Dragon Summer camp came to a wonderful conclusion. Students enjoyed making new friends, learned about Chinese language and culture, improved basketball skills, engaged in STEM activities, and had fun in different activity centers.

We adapted parts of the text, Kite, written by Pingao Jia in Chinese language class. Several sentences learned each day not only helped our students get familiar with frequently-used word and sentence structures, but followed our STEAM procedures to make kites (e.g. observing the shapes of kites, thinking and finding materials for making kites, making kites, experimenting, identifying problems, improving or redoing works, and then adding decorations). Our volunteers assisted our students with English-Chinese translation, Chinese character and sentence construction, and STEM development. In STEAM classes, they helped our students synthesize math and science knowledge to create kites.

In the cultural lessons, we first learned that the kite was invented in China about 3000 years ago. We learned about the kite’s applications in Ancient China, such as measuring distances, signaling, and military communications, etc... In Tang dynasty, kites were commonly used for recreation. Now, kite is for art creation. For example, widespread modern recreational use of kites was seen in China’s Tang Dynasty. We also discussed how kites were introduced to other countries and how each country came up with its own unique variation of the kite. Our students made a Japanese Fish Kite called windsocks. We learned the poem, Cunju, and the song, Kite. Here are the links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juBxrxThoSQ；and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k_3xBtULW4 . On Friday, we were able to learn about the cultural meaning and significance of kites, such as brining luck, getting rid of diseas

Basketball is a good activity for a growing child. It involves many swift movements and rigorous use of the entire body. During the morning basketball instructional time, Coach Ma and Coach Ben taught basic skills (such as dribbling and passing). They worked hard to correct students’ postures, and our students were very quick learners. During the afternoon game-time, Coach Ma taught students some typical basketball rules and strategies.

We also had morning math time. Students benefited from middle / high school volunteers who have had experiences in their school’s respective mathematics teams or clubs. One-on-one mentoring helped our students gain advanced skills and develop critical thinking abilities.

In the play time, students stayed with their friends to play in Maple Maze and in swimming pool.

We are grateful to Liu Laoshi and Xinyi Laoshi who introduced Peking Opera to our students. It was so fun to practice “yi-yi” and “a~~” sounds and to paint faces. We thank our counselors and volunteers for their hard work. It was amazing to see our students learn so much in such a short time span, from constructing their own kites to memorizing an entire piece of traditional Chinese poetry. We hope all the children had a wonderful time during camp, and we look forward to seeing them again.

Fly Kite!

古诗-村居

歌曲-风筝