The followin clip gives us a good overview of the traditions of Chinese New Year and why certain rituals are done at this particular time:
A huge part of the Chinese New Year customs and traditions have to do with family life, as shown by the following clip:
Even though the generic parts of the Chinese New Year tradition are still practised by Chinese people around the world, the more traditional (countryside) parts of the festival are not always known to the younger generation who are more used to living in cities:
Spring cleaning the house before Chinese Yew Year is part of the tradition of the festival, so we cleaned our house as much as possible with the major effort going into rearranging and cleaning Tiger's bedroom so that he now has his own personal place to work.
After that, we went to Chinatown to buy the ingredients that we would need for our new year's eve Reunion Dinner,
as well as a few decorations for the house.
London Chinatown is the most festive place in the UK to get a feel for Chinese New Year. However, the scale of the celebration and the number of people involved are nowhere close to some places in the Far East, where the festival is featured more prominently:
After the decorations were put up around the house, Tiger also arranged a centrepiece of a bowl of tangerines with stem and leaves intact to represent wholeness, balance, wealth, and good luck. Orange-coloured citrus fruit is a usual display during Chinese New Year for its symbolic meaning. The orange colour represents gold or wealth, while the Chinese names of various citrus fruit sound like the word "ji" (吉), which means good luck.
Have you noticed the red table cloth? We're nearly ready for the Reunion Dinner!
Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. Like the Western New Year, Chinese people usher in the Chinese New Year with a countdown and fireworks on new year's eve.
It is certainly much more festive and done a much bigger scale in the Far East than in the UK. The Chinese New Year lights and the number of decorations in the Far East where Chinese is the dominant culture reminds me very much of the same level of festivities during Christmas time here.
Tiger and I are joining many Chinese people around the world to celebrate this ancient tradition. I will be taking a few days off to celebrate it with my family, but I hope to be back soon to share what we have done.
Being the last-minuter that I am, I must be asking for trouble by declaring on Monday that we plan to learn more about Chinese New Year this year, when the big day is only days away. That is a sure way to work myself into a frenzy!
Luckily the V&A came to my rescue yet again, with a whole day of Chinese New Year related activities! Woo hoo! With many varied cultural activities prepared by professionals, all we had to do was to show up and work our way through them -- such an arrangement is this homeschool mum's best-case scenario.
The museum's central courtyard has a large landscape installation by a modern Chinese artist. The landscape is of major significance in Chinese art, as seen in the art of bonsai and traditional Chinese landscape paintings. While the pre-Impressionistic Western landscape paintings' emphasis is on realistic representation, the Chinese landscape paintings have always been non-representative, with its emphasis being on conveying certain philosophical and spiritual aspirations (most notably due to the influence of Laozi's philosophy as expressed in Taoism).
The first craft that Tiger made at the museum was the Chinese Opera mask.
The mask is made entirely out of paper and looks like this when completed:
Traditional Chinese Opera masks are painted directly onto the actors' faces, using specific colours and patterns to represent well-known operatic characters.
After the craft session, the museum even had a short "Introduction to Chinese Opera" workshop to take the children through a few of the uniquely-identifiable stage gestures and movements of each character.
Other activities Tiger was to do that day included:
(1) Making a mini kite out of lollisticks, craft tissues and coloured cards.
(2) Watching a paper cutting demonstration.
(3) Practising Chinese calligraphy. The practice in Chinese New Year is to write certain auspicious wordings on a piece of red paper and stick them around the house to signify bringing good luck and prosperity into the home. A very common word that is used is "fu" (福), that embodies the meaning of good luck and good fortune. There are many different styles or schools of Chinese calligraphy, hence there are numerous ways to write the word "fu", as you can see Tiger practising below.
The day ended with us attending a traditional Chinese instrumental concert, performed by the musicians from the UK Chinese Ensemble.
The style, sounds, and atmosphere of traditional Chinese music is very
different from those of classical Western music. The concert gave the
audience an excellent experience with a wide repertoire of solo pieces,
duets, as well as ensemble pieces. For example:
(1) a zither or guqin (古琴) ensemble:
The finale was a traditional Chinese New Year piece titled <<喜洋洋>>, loosely translated as "Beaming with Joy":
The score for this piece of traditional Chinese New Year music was rearranged for the ensemble performance at the V&A. It was originally written for a full Chinese orchestra:
The day has been a good introductory overview to the Chinese culture. To do justice to the depth and breadth of the Chinese culture (as it is with any culture), we will have to spend more time to study the individual components of this one-day "crash course" individually.
Ball #3: Mathematics - Addition and Area
The way that we have been learning mathematics here seems to be increasingly topic- or themed-based rather than curriculum-based, which suits us fine. We started off following a maths curriculum, which worked very well, but was starting to get a little tedious for Tiger. Once we started experimenting with learning-what-we-want-to-learn-when-we-want-to in maths, the approach feels a lot more logical and natural to us and is what we do now.
This term we are going to focus on two topics:
addition
area
What About Gaps?
It seems that many homeschoolers are uncomfortable with the idea of not following a curriculum in maths. Usually their biggest concern is gaps in their children's maths skills or knowledge. Following an established curriculum certainly gives some people -- notably adult and children who are naturally predisposed to a systematic, highly organised way of learning -- a sense of security that they have "covered everything" that a child of a certain age/level needs to know.
The way that I handle the question of gaps is very simple: I make a mental note of it when I notice it, then I find an opportune time to introduce it. The next question then is, what is an opportune time? Well, my definition of an opportune time is:
when I have gathered the necessary teaching materials/resources; or
when the topic ties in with another area that we are studying, e.g. there are many cross-curricula opportunities to be created around the topic of geometry, symmetry, tessallations, Islamic art, etc; or
immediately - we are prepared to drop everything else if it is a matter of urgency to learn a certain topic. So far, we haven't come across any situation that requires us to adress our mathematical deficiencies immediately.
My confidence in our approach comes from the realisation that:
Time is on our side. Tiger is only nine years old so he still has quite a few years to go before he has to worry about standardised tests or entrance exams. I might start panicking if we were still on the topic of addition when he is 19 years old.
Tiger is capable of buckling down to do the work when it becomes necessary.
Once I got over my initial fear of gaps (yes, I experienced much doubts and fears in the early days as well), I have come to view the learning of mathematics to be more than the acquisition of multiple sets of facts, short-cuts, and formulae. It is a language of its own. As soon as I realised that mathematics is a language, I decided that, as with any language-learning, establishing a strong foundation is very important. Just as a strong language user needs to have a contextual base to understanding and mastering the subtlties of any language, a strong maths user needs to have be able to apply mathematical skills and knowledge for them to become meaningful. Merely memorising mathematical formulae without the experience of applying them to solve real problems (as opposed to clinically designed textbook problems) is akin to memorising English idioms without knowing how to use them in the right context.
What About Practice and Mastery?
Having explained (I hope) above why I'm ok with Tiger's maths progress not following exactly in the same order or at the same pace as determined by any curriculum, you can see why I can tolerate us dwelling on any topic -- addition comes to mind immediately -- forever. However, the time that we spend on any one topic is not used on repetitive drills or learning the same set of skills at the same level over and over. An example is the latest addition game that we played. Different maths skills were used at the same time to solve that set of problems -- addition, long multiplication, counting, number sense. When we play maths games or riddles like the example that I have just referred to, both Tiger and I can easily and clearly determine whether he has any gaps in his knowledge (in which case we will work at closing those) or where his gaps are (so that we can direct our effort more effectively)
A tool that I find to be effective for practice is the Khan Academy's maths section. I've mentioned before our sporadic use of the website whenever we feel Tiger needs to have more focused practice on any topic. Most recently, we discovered a new feature on the website called Mastery Challenge, which is very similar to a series of short composite tests on various maths topics. Tiger doesn't mind working on a few rounds of these each day.
To me, it works in the same way as what we have been doing at home to identify gaps and areas of improvement. For example, one of the recent challenges shows that Tiger needs more work on the long division (which we had touched upon briefly in November but not formally worked on yet). With this information, Tiger watched the two-digit division video:
and worked through the example alongside the video, before attempting several rounds of two-digit divisions on the site. Working on these exercises enables Tiger to solve a recent maths challenge, but it is not the way in which I would like him to learn long division (even though he certainly can do them mechanically now), so we will spend some time later in the year to learn division in a more visual, hands-on way.
I don't claim that our method of learning maths is superior to any other method, but it is one that suits Tiger's need for variety, applicability, and minimal repetition.
This is the second part of a series of my termly plans. The first part is Ball #1: Language Arts.
Ball #2: Mandarin - Language and Culture Language
Tiger's
Chinese class is working out very well for him. He has been able to
keep up with the speed of the lessons (by putting in a fair bit of hard work)
and it is paying off. His interest and confidence in learning the
language has increased substantially because: (1) he feels encouraged and recognised by his teacher when she gave him a
classroom assistant role to teach the rest of the class a small part of
the new lessons, and (2) he is motivated to
maintain his recent exam success.
We are all encouraged by Tiger's positive experience at the Chinese
school so he will continue with the course there. Staying on top of the
weekly homework and revisions will be our focus -- there is very little
time or need for us to do much else in terms of studying Mandarin at home.
Our commitment to learning Mandarin also means that we will have to forego Latin. Boo. Sed valefaciens, et lingua decora!
Culture
Learning
a language is best supplemented by an understanding of its culture of
origin. Getting to know a culture makes the language come alive, so
while the Chinese school is now taking on the bulk of language training
for Tiger, we are supplementing his learning and experience by watching a
few cultural-related clips online.
We find the individual lessons at Growing up with Chinese
to be very lively and interesting. Each lesson focuses on a certain
aspect of social engagement, as well as a few tips on understanding the
Chinese characters, all set within a story.
For a more contemporary understanding of modern China, we are currently watching the 10-part BBC TV series, Real Chinese:
After we have watched the series above, I plan to continue with our armchair cultural immersion by working our way through the documentaries here.
A new project that I'd like to take on this year is to spend two
weeks focusing on Chinese New Year. It will be very similar to how we
usually spend the month of December focusing on Christmas-related activities. I am getting a lot of ideas for Chinese New Year from Marie's Pastiche, which has a whole year's worth of China-related ideas and activities to learn from.
Naturally, being near a river is going to be a concern at a time like this. However, river flooding doesn't necessarily have to become hazardous, if proper planning and management have been done to make use of the sediments deposited by the flood water, as we have learnt two years ago in world history -- where the flooding of the River Nile was a major source of the fertiility of the lands around it. Below are some phots of the experiment we did to illustrate the flooding of the Nile leading to fertile land. We used planted grass seeds in an aluminium tray, flooded the "river", and waited for a week for all the water to be absorbed and the grass to grow.
The Thames is a tidal river, hence very susceptible to flooding. Having London flooded would be extremely costly, hence the Thames Barrier has been very much in use these few weeks to make sure that doesn't happen:
Apart from rivers being a potential source of flooding, coastal flooding can be lethal too:
The force of water can be illustrated by making a simple water wheel using plastic cups and paper plates. It works but isn't very robust, being made out of paper plates and all, so the rain made it very soggy after a few hours. Nonetheless, it served its purpose before it disintegrated.
It seems that the trouble is going to persist for a while yet...
For anyone who is living in a high flood-risk area, it's probably a very good idea to learn from here all about how to prepare for a potential flood, what to do during and after a flood, and how to manage flood risks. Alternatively, much can be learned from books too.
It wasn't just in our area. It seemed that most of the country was shrouded in the fog. Since it was everywhere, we decided to find out more about it. We were surprised to find there to be so many different classifications of fogs, and determined that what we had must have been a freezing fog (as opposed to a coastal fog), which is related to the supercooled water concept that we learnt last week. It might well have been a radiation fog, had it not been for the accompany feathery ice crystals that we saw on the window pane in the morning.
We have driven in thick fogs before so we remember what the hazard that the fog can present. Therefore, it is good to heed the advice of the Met Office, even though what they're telling us is very much a matter of common sense.
There are two types of warnings for a fog:
(1) yellow
