Mid-Autumn day!

I'm not a big festival person, but Mid-Autumn festival is one of the biggest traditional festivals in China as well as in many other Asian countries, like Vietnam! We don't have a day off for this holiday, but you do see there are a lot of moon cake stands everywhere on the streets of HCMC. Our cleaning lady was really happy when we gave her a box of moon cakes.

Well, you can't escape from this topic if you are a Mandarin teacher. I copied some stories, poems and gave them to my Mandarin 3 kids one week before the Mid-autumn day, the worst thing ever can happen is when kids yelling out:" Our teacher gave them to us last year!" Bummer~~~~~~~~~~
So what can I do? Change plans.
"Well, in that case, I will ask you to remember that poem! In addition, you need to learn a song and make a lantern!" I wasn't very confident, I should have asked their last year teacher what they did, I learned my lesson, but I still need to do my job as best as I can.
I picked the famous poem 静夜思, and the song 月亮代表我的心，I have taught my mandarin 2 kids this song, they loved it, it's simple and sweet. Make a lantern is not as hard as it sounds( see the pictures above). I divided the kids into groups with 4, the assignment was a team performance on Mid- autumn day, they have to work together.

I have to say, my kids rocked! Their performance were awesome, I regret I didn't have my camera that day, it would be great if I filmed the whole performance. Thankfully I got all the lanterns hung up in my room, they looked awesome! This is the best mid-autumn day I ever had!

Ps: my colleague Mei asked her students to interview other teachers about Mid-autumn festival. It's really interesting, because teachers in our school come from many different countries, the original story had a lot of crazy and amazing versions in the west, which we have never heard of. It will be interesting to collect them one day.