In order to help PKU Shenzhen international students get to know Chinese culture and enhance the friendship and mutual trust between the newcomers, the Chinese as a foreign language teaching group of the General Education Center organized a “Celebrating Mid-Autumn Day by Making Mooncakes" activity. The activity was held on September 7 in Cooking Fun. Nearly 50 international students participated!
As part of the curriculum, this activity fully reflects the General Education Center's policy of "integrating the Chinese teaching into campus life, increasing opportunities for international students to experience Chinese culture."
The event began with a warm-up activity called "nose glue paper", and the winner was PHBS full-time student Japhet Lihanjala from Tanzania. So awesome nose!
Then, Chinese course manager Teacher Yan, introduced the history and customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Besides appreciating the moon, lanterns and eating moon cakes, the most important thing for Chinese people is family reunion. Therefore, mooncakes are round to represent both the full moon and the family reunion. Meanwhile, the Mid-Autumn festival is one of the four most important traditional festivals in China. Teacher Yan said, “This time we not only ate moon cakes, we taught everyone how to make "ice mooncakes!"
Although it is only a small mooncake, students immersed themselves and completed the task very seriously. Some students even made creative shapes for their mooncake.
After making the mooncakes, everyone wrote their names on the boxes. This was the first time they had made mooncakes by hand.
Then, while waiting for the mooncakes to freeze, the teacher and the students played a game of charades. They had to explain the words they saw in Chinese, and then their teammates had to guess the words in Chinese. Students clearly had a lot of fun with this challenge.
After the word game, teacher Li Ming from the PHBS lead the group in a game where participants had to pour beer with their mouth only. Students cooperative spirit showed even more during this tasty beer activity. Victory went to whoever finished the task first and drank up the beer!
Half an hour later, the mooncakes were out! It was an exciting and satisfying moment! Students were clearly very pleased with their own mooncakes!
Although it was only a two-hour activity, students spent their first and very important Chinese traditional festival together. Many students ended up saying "thank you" and "very happy" to their teachers. We hope they can learn Chinese well and experience more Chinese festivals in the future!
Finally, we would like to give special thanks to Ms. Amanda who taught us how to make mooncakes, teacher Lu who organized the Chinese character games, and photographer Hui Ming!
We wish you a happy Mid-Autumn Festival!
