Around the World: China

In February, our travels with Five in a Row took us to China with The Story about Ping by Marjorie Flack.

 

Our studies coincided with Chinese New Year, so we learned a bit about the holiday by reading in DK Children Just Like Me: Celebrations and reading a folktale from the library about the lanterns. We also made a neat dragon book about Chinese New Year and some lanterns with Chinese numbers from History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations. Ella also happened to be learning about Chinese folktales in her writing curriculum, so it dovetailed nicely.

We learned about the Yangtze river and watched an episode of Travel with Kids where the family takes a cruise on the  Yangtze. In art, we drew pictures of water with colored pencil and practiced some of the techniques the illustrator used to make reflections of the water. They turned out beautifully, but I didn't get pictures. We also watched Mulan and Mulan II just for fun.

We had our biweekly co-op science class on Ocean creatures, and I was teaching this week about Mollusks. We learned about resonance and why it seems like you can hear the ocean in a seashell. So I followed it up with a lesson from Mystery Science on Why are Some Sounds High and Some Sounds Low? We made sound waves with jump ropes to demonstrate the frequency of different sounds.

 

Our tea party was pretty simple this time. I bought some rice cakes, which have a prominent place in The Story about Ping, and mandarin oranges, a traditional food to eat at Chinese New Year. We drank green tea in our Chinese tea pot and pulled out our lucky cricket candleholders.

  We also made red paper lanterns and fans to decorate.

 Last year, my friend Jenny gave me some traditional Chinese clothes that her girls had outgrown. They would wear these at Chinese New Year every year. We really enjoyed trying on the silk outfits for our tea party (well, the girls did at least.) Ella was pretending to be a Chinese grandpa. Thanks, Jenny!