Tang Yuan -Chinese New Year dumpling

Typical food for Chinese New Year is the Tang Yuan, a type of dumpling made from glutinous rice flour that is rolled into balls and stuffed with either sweet or spicy fillings such as sesame, red bean, or peanut butter paste. We made some of these in our conversation class.

Lysiane, Nik, Lily, Didi and Gwendoline write down the recipe for making Tang Yuan so that they can make some more at home.

Farah rolls a ball of glutinous rice before stuffing it and cooking it. Yuko watches her before.......

she rolls one of her own.

Zul is obviously enjoying rolling his Tang Yuan. I wonder what he will stuff his with - will it be sweet or spicy ?

Mike carefully watches how James rolls his Tang Yuan. James concentrates as he makes his dumpling.

Mike is the chief cook and he puts the Tang Yuan into boiling water - when the dumplings float up to the top of the water, they are cooked and need to be taken out.

Chetna watches carefully so that she learns what to do and next time she can become a cook and help Mike with his cooking task.

Proud makers of Tang Yuan - Chinese New Year dumplings. Ready to serve and eat. They look very good for a first effort!

James suggests that Mr McKenzie should be the first to try one of the Tang Yuan made by the group.

What does he think of the Tang Yuan? Can you guess from his expression or is the glutinous rice too sticky ?

Chinese New Year 2010

We celebrated Chinese New Year at school.

2010 is the Year of the Tiger

The word "Yu" for fish sounds like the words for both wish and abundance. On New Year's Eve people often eat a whole fish at the end of the evening meal as a wish for togetherness and abundance for the following year. It is also thought that if you do not eat meat on the first day of the Chinese New Year then you will be ensured of a long and happy life.

We saw the Lion Dance performance at the Dunedin Chinese Gardens

We celebrated the Lantern Festival that marks the end of the 15 day New Year Season.

The Dunedin Chinese Garden was decorated with lanterns for the Chinese New Year Festival celebrations. Lanterns light your way into a bright and happy future.

Yi Yi wore a beautiful new red outfit for New Year. Red clothing is common during the Chinese New Year season. Red is a bright, happy colour that will bring a sunny and bright future. Your appearance and attitude during New Year sets the tone for the rest of the year. Red is also the colour of fire and fire burns off bad luck.

Chinese let off fire crackers on Chinese New Year's Eve to send off the old year and welcome in the new year.

Cultural celebration in Dunedin

Our conversation group went with their families and teacher to a wonderful English Language Partners' evening of cultural celebration in Burns Hall. Many people wore their tradition clothes and looked really lovely in such brightly coloured and beautiful materials.

Here we are together for a group photograph at the end of an enjoyable evening together. Can you recognise any one?

Rashmin and Chetna were there with their son Nirgoon. Chetna and Nirgood performed an Indian song for us. We enjoyed listening to their performance and their beautiful singing voices.

James and Sarah came too. Sarah wore her traditional Korean costume called a hanbok. She looked very elegant in her lovely yellow hanbok.

Nik look beautiful too, in her Malaysian traditional dress called a baju kabaya.

Farewell to Mike (Yabin) Li

Mike is returning to his home city of Xi'an in China. He has been a member of the North East Valley conversation group for one and a half semesters and the group will very much miss him and his great sense of humour.

Paul Naidu came to say goodbye to Mike and to wish him well in the future.

Rajendra and Madhu said goodbye to Mike too!

Safe travels Mike!

Duality posters - two or more or many perspectives

We had fun making our duality posters. We talked with our families and thought about the important things to include on our duality posters to share with other people so that they have a better understanding of our dual perspective.

These posters show that we are learners with dual culture and dual language.

We have and will always have two or more or many perspectives.

Lei and Sara come from Tonga and have a Tongan perspective and a New Zealand perspective. They have two languages, Tongan and English, and so they have two ways of expressing words and ideas.

It is always important to remember that coming from another country and culture we will always have a dual perspective.

Faith comes from the Philippines and has two perspectives, a Philippine perspective and a New Zealand perspective. Her poster clearly illustrates her duality.

Our duality posters show the similarities and differences between our two cultures and languages.

Aini and Ahmad come from Malaysia so they have a Malyasian and New Zealand perspective.

Their duality maps show the similarities and differences between New Zealand and Malaysia.

Helping the birds in cold weather

We put some bird seed balls in the garden. We hung them in the trees. Can you see the round bird seed ball in the tree?

We gave the birds some fresh fruit to eat.

We hung the fruit in the trees with the bird seed cake so that when the birds are feeding the cats can not catch them.

Ahmad and Aminio put their apples on to a piece of string and tied them in the trees. The birds started to eat them very quickly. Lots of waxeyes (white-eyes) came to peck at the fruit.

Adam made a hole through the middle of his apple and took out the apple core which he put in the bird seed cake. He threaded string through the hole so that he could hang the apple in the trees for the birds to eat.

Sara used the apple corer to take the core out of the apple. Our teacher used the vegetable knife to peel a little of the apple skin off the apple so that the birds could easily peck it.

We all had a turn at making a hole in the

apples and pears. We used an apple corer to make the hole and our teacher used a vegetable knife to cut some skin off the apple so that the birds

could peck it.

We learned many new words today. Here are some of them:

core, corer, dripping (fat) wax-eye, bellbird, sparrow, chaffinch, string,

to tie, to hang, to peck, to thread, to flutter their wings, feathers.

We have a lovely book which helps us to identify the birds that come to our feeding area. It is called "City Birds - A Dunedin Field Guide". It is written by Sue Michelsen-Heath and Ilka Sohle with photography by Stephen Jaquiery. It is published by the Otago Daily Times, 2005.

Aminio helps to make bird seed cakes

I am Aminio. I helped to make the bird seed cakes. I helped to melt the dripping (fat) in the pan and to stir in the bird seeds and pieces of fruit. It is fun watching the birds come to eat the bird seed cake. We see lots of birds from our classroom window.

Making a seed cake for the birds

The weather is very cold and there are not very many seeds and berries left in the school grounds for the birds to eat, so we decided to make some extra food for the birds. We had some dripping (fat) which we had to melt. Adam held the saucepan carefully and we put the fat in the saucepan and our teacher heated it on the cooker so that it melted.

Here you can see the dripping is starting to melt in the bottom of the saucepan. We stirred it with a wooden spoon.

Very soon, all the dripping had melted and we had a saucepan of liquid fat. We had to be very careful because hot fat is very dangerous. Our teacher carried the saucepan.
We took the saucepan back to our classroom to make the seed cake for the birds. We broke up brown bread into small pieces and dropped them into the melted fat. We then added a lot of bird seeds, some pieces of apple, some pieces of pear and some bacon pieces. Sara is stirring the mixture with Adam and Aminio, Ahmad and Lei are watching.
We took turns and stirred the mixture with the wooden spoon until all the ingredients were well mixed and all the melted fat had gone. When this was done we had to put the bird seed cake into containers.

More learning about Malaysia and Malaysian culture

Ani, Nik and Zul worked very hard at preparing things to show us how to cook jemput-jemput pisang or fried banana balls. They tasted magnificent. We all enjoyed eating them very much.
Ani and Nik cooked the jemput-jemput pisang because the electric frying pan had to be very hot to cook them properly and it was not safe for children to be cooking, but we helped them to prepare the jemput-jemput pisang for cooking.
Nik and Ani labelled everything and we helped to mash the bananas and measure the other ingredients. We also wrote down the recipe so that everyone could try to cook jemput-jemput pisang at home.
We took turns at helping with the preparation for cooking. It was fun learning how to cook food from another country. Some of us had eaten banana fritters before but the jemput-jemput pisang tasted a bit different. Sweet and tasty! Yummy!
Zul helped with the cooking too but he also taught us a lot of interesting things about Malaysia. He taught us how to correctly pronounce some Malaysian words. He wore his traditional costume to school for us to see. Zul wore a baju melayu and a songkok on his head.

Learning about Malaysia

Our Malaysian families have taught us so much about Malaysia and have shared many aspects of their culture with us. We are so lucky to have learned so many interesting things from them.

Nik came and talked to us about her home country, Malaysia. She showed us photographs and a map of Malaysia and talked to us about things that we could see in the pictures. She answered our questions.
She taught us some Malaysian greetings and how to say a few things in Malaysian. It made us realise how difficult it can be learning another language. It is easier if you have a native speaker of the language there to help you.

Malaysian Martial Art display

Members of our Malaysian community shared some of their culture with us and we had a wonderful performance of Malaysian martial art. It was amazing and looked really difficult to perform. It was really special and was something that many of us had not seen before.

Teaching our teacher - Samoan dancing

We learn from each other. Rita, Junior and Soli taught Mrs Probert how to do a Samoan dance. She really enjoyed dancing but found it quite difficult. She really had to concentrate.Soli, Rita and Junior (and Dawane who is not in the picture) presented our school with a lovely kava bowl before they returned to live in Samoa. It is a beautiful and very special present and we felt very honoured to be given such a special gift.
Soli lead the school in some Samoan song and dance. His mother helped him to do so. He did it really well and we had great fun.
Rita explains to the whole school about the kava bowl that her family gifted to the school.