Enter the Dragon

On January 23^rd we welcomed the Chinese New Year of the Dragon.   This year is special since the Chinese dragon symbolizes power, dignity, and embodiment of virtue and strength.  We wish great happiness and prosperity will be brought to us.

During the last couple of weeks, I have been introducing the Chinese New Year to students at The Phoenix School, Shore Country Day School, and my students at the Salem Athenaeum.  We raised the red lanterns, read stories, learned about the Chinese zodiac, and made the dumplings.  Students learned to say dragon in Chinese: 龙(lóng) and write the character for good luck: 福(fú).

One question I got from students was: What is the Chinese dragon?  Is it real?  We learned that the Chinese dragon is considered the largest divine animal in China and its most popular mascot.  It has a cow’s head, deer’s antlers, shrimp’s eyes, eagle’s claws, snake’s body, lion’s tail, and four legs with five claws on each foot; its body is covered with scales. The Chinese dragon is a mythical creature with inexhaustible magical power: it can walk on land, swim in water, and fly in the clouds.

May you have a great happy New Year of the Dragon!

Happy New Year 2012

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year!

This New Year seems so special to me -- it’s the 25^th anniversary of my arrival in the US for graduate study at the end of 1986.  Time flies.  Please don’t tell me that I am not young any more.  I know it.  

25 years ago, I came to the US with my own American dream.   I have studied and worked hard, thrived and achieved.  In 2007, I moved to Paris with my family and saw the world from another point of view.  Standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I realized the world had changed.  China had risen from the East.  I started to look to the east from the west, looking back to my birthplace, Beijing, and was inspired by the new globalization.

In the last three years, I have been engaged in sharing my native Chinese language and culture with local Americans on the north shore of Boston.  I have been very happy teaching young children and sharing with adults.  I have been amazed by mothers who see the future of the world and encourage their children to learn Chinese language and culture.  I have been excited to see many local schools educating their students to be the global citizens and leaders of the 21^st century.  I have felt so fortunate to be able to attend exhibitions from Beijing at the Peabody Essex Museum.

What I have seen this past year is that businesses have started engaging with China more actively.  I have trained American expats and coached software engineers for their journeys to Beijing.  I have attended events where both Americans and Chinese shared their ideas and stories in Sino-American economic development.

Gradually I have started to realize my new dream -- to build bridges between Americans and Chinese to imagine, explore, and succeed. 

As we toast the New Year 2012 and get ready to light the firecrackers for the Year of the Dragon, I look forward to having more of my dream come true.  

If you want to learn Chinese yourself, or cultivate your children’s Chinese heritage, or simply raise them as tomorrow’s citizens of the world, I am at your service.  Panda Land also provides consulting and services to business and organizations for their efforts in connecting between America and China.

Please feel free to contact me if I can be any help to your endeavor in the New Year.

Best regards,

Judy Wang Bedell

  

Panda Land 

Chinese Lessons for Americans - friendly, engaging, personalized.

Cross-Cultural Education and Consulting - bridging the gap in a personal way.

www.pandalandchinese.com

Bilingual and Executive Function

As I help my children to learn to manage their daily routines, schoolwork, and social life, I have heard the child development term “executive function” and attended seminars on helping children develop their “executive function”.  Suggestions include check lists, post-it notes around the house, agenda books for organization, a 5-point scale to regulate behaviors and emotion, alternative approaches, flexibility, etc.  It is all rather challenging for children under 16 years old in today’s busy world.  Experts say the frontal and prefrontal cortex won’t be fully developed until 22 to 25 years old.  Meanwhile, we as parents need to be their surrogates and executive officers.

Being a young child and a teenager’s executive officer is certainly not an easy task.  I hope my kids will have strong executive function skills and manage their life effectively.  Today I read that bilingual ability may help develop executive function.  That’s worth noting.

“Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html?hpw

A Good Start to the New School Year

Today is a beautiful day, feeling more like summer than fall.   For my son’s family homework day, we went to the Russell Orchards farm in Ipswich for apple picking.  We took the hay ride into the orchard. With the blue sky and red apples hanging on trees it was picturesque.  Walking around the orchard with the sweet air, we were eating while picking apples off the tree.  It was a very nice way to unwind from the first week of teaching for Panda Land Chinese Fall 2011 and helping my own children settle into their new school year.

This week I was happy to return to Shore Country Day School to teach Chinese for its afterschool enrichment program.  I said Ni Hao to one class of 2^nd to 4^th grade students and another of 5^th grade students.  Some of them studied with me last year and happily return to learn more; others are new students who were eager to learn Chinese with me.   

On Tuesday at the Salem Athenaeum, we resumed our children’s Chinese class.  A new girl from China joined us.  I was glad to see that she and the other students were so friendly with each other.  Saturday I taught two lovely young children age 3 & 5 (brother and sister) their first Panda Land Chinese lesson.  They sang the children’s song of Liang Zhi Lao Hu (Two Tigers) to me -- Chinese lyrics to the same melody as “Frère Jacques”.  At the end of each class, I gave each child moon cakes to celebrate the Chinese Autumn Moon Festival.

At Panda Land we have children of all different backgrounds learning Chinese together.  I felt so lucky to have such a wonderful opportunity to teach these American children my native language and share with them my own heritage.

American Common Touch in China

This past week, I have been reading news about Vice President Joe Biden visiting China, mostly about visiting Beijing since I am originally from there. What I enjoyed most is the reports about Joe Biden going for lunch in a local restaurant in Beijing. The place, the people, and the food were all so authentic and touching to me. Mr. Biden stepped into this everyday life of ordinary people in Beijing, and we got a chance to see it. For the last few years, we’ve heard so much about China’s economic development and its rising role in the world, but this episode of Joe Biden mingling with ordinary people in an ordinary place in Beijing captured my heart -- Americans and Chinese are getting closer and closer. We are not only talking about the big political and economic issues, but also getting connected in simple everyday life, sharing soybean paste noodles, steamed pork buns, cucumber salads…

In a Chinese report I read, Joe Biden was referred as ye ye (grandfather) introducing his sun nu (granddaughter) to China. They toured the Forbidden City and walked on the Great Wall. In the restaurant at lunch, Joe Biden was introducing his granddaughter to the Chinese: “This is my granddaughter.” His 18-year-old granddaughter Naomi has studied Chinese for 5 years. During the trip, she has been very helpful to her grandfather with translation of Chinese.

Someday, I would like to introduce China to my children and show them around in Beijing. But I know I need to put in the effort now. They need to learn Chinese and get to know the culture. I am sure if you want to introduce your children to China someday, you would want them to learn Chinese now.

THE CHINESE CONCEPTION OF TIME

Last night I was helping my son with his Chinese homework. The subject was time, e.g. last month, this month, next month, yesterday, today, tomorrow, past and future, etc.

To explain time, I drew an axis. In English, time is coming towards us from the front as if we are facing upriver. In Chinese, we face the past, as if looking downriver, since the past is visible to us, but the future is not yet visible. Yesterday came in front of Today, and Tomorrow will come after Today. Therefore in Chinese, we say the past is “in front” of the future which is coming “afterward”.

In my family it is no surprise that we see things from two different points of view. Anyway, China has a long history so there is a lot to see in the past.

Green Eggs and Ham 绿鸡蛋和火腿

After a long winter, we started our Chinese classes for Spring 2011. Yesterday before Easter Sunday at the children’s class, we reviewed the sentence patterns for to eat, to drink, and like to eat, like to drink, etc. The children conversed with each other using the sentence patterns with different vocabulary, e.g. "What do you eat?" "I eat carrots." “Do you like to eat onions?” “I don’t like to eat onions.” “I like to eat potatoes.” Then I moved on to teach them how to indicate the past, present, and future, e.g. yesterday, today, and tomorrow. To make the sentence drill more fun, we practiced on saying what each of us would eat and drink on the next day, Easter Sunday. Since many of us would have ham for Easter dinner, I told everyone that the Chinese phrase for ham is “fire leg”. This reminded them that the Chinese for turkey is “fire chicken”. Now with the Easter bunny jumping around in their heads, the kids got very creative. They started to put the words they have learned together to say “Tomorrow I will eat a Chocolate Rabbit.” “Do you like to eat Green Eggs and Ham?”

“Are we doing Dr. Seuss in Chinese?” one student asked.

Later I googled on Green Eggs and Ham and found this website on chinesepod.com/lessons/chinese-green-eggs-and-ham. It sounds like a fun lesson. You may want to listen to it when you get a chance.

Here are more Chinese translations from this Dr. Seuss rhyme:

——你喜欢吃绿蛋和火腿吗？ ——你喜欢在这里吃或者那里吃吗？ ——你喜欢在房子里吃或者和老鼠一起吃吗？ ——你喜欢在盒子里吃或者和狐狸一起吃吗？ ——你喜欢在船上吃或者和山羊一起吃吗？ --山姆是我

I hope you had a wonderful Easter dinner today with your family and you liked everything you ate.