Chinese kindergarten

Princess has been going to Chinese kindergarten since September. It is very different from US. When she enrolled, the head of foriegn affairs handled everything for us. So we just paid and dropped her off the next day. The first week she came home speaking all these Russian sounding words. We were confused, but thought great-another language!
So, I asked some of my students whose children also go there if they have Russian lessons. They said no. Then when I went to pick her up, the staff was talking to me in Russian. I think they thought we were Russian since most white folks in Harbin are Russian. It took a few days, but we did finally come to the understanding that we are American. In the beginning everyday, we took her and they redid her hair. At home she won't let us do anything with her hair, but at school she wound up with all sorts of fancy hairstyles. It was the same in Shenyang when she went to preschool. Except they took it a little too far and gave renamed her Barbie. I was mad, but quickly got over it because they couldn't say the "r" in Barbie, so what the called her sounded like "Bobby" at that is my uncle and Grandpa's name so I figured that's ok.
Princess only goes in the mornings. They feed them breakfast at 8:15 and then lunch around 11:30.

Eating at Shenyang Preschool

They don't have a cafeteria so they eat in their classrooms. They have whole rooms of bunk beds for them to take naps. Princess doesn't do naps. The room full of beds really scared her. I think that because we had volunteered at the orphanage, when she saw those beds she thought we were leaving her there. When they feed the kids, they bring the food in big stainless steel buckets. At the orphanage they used plastic buckets.

Delivering lunch

When I first saw the "slop buckets", I was quite taken back. But I think now, I understand that there isn't any malice in the food delivery, it is just practical. The kitchen is down stairs. The classrooms are all over. Instead of big bowls, it is easy to carry buckets. Even in our home the ayi thinks we are crazy when we use a big bowl to cook with sometimes. They use big bowls to wash dishes, clean stuff.
Her class is pretty big, over 25 kids. They have 2 main teachers, then a chinese English teacher comes in a few times a week. The lunch ladies also help out when they are not cooking. Since this is a university, students do community service or student teaching as well. So although the class is very big, they are always lots of adults.
Halfway through this semester, they began teaching pin yin. Before that, maybe they just taught characters. We couldn't decide if Princess should learn pin yin or not. How confusing to learn different sounds for the letters, what if when we take her back to Lummi Island & she can't read English? They handed out little books for homework and Princess was very upset. We thought about giving up on kindergarten, but decided that we would just leave the books at school and what happens there, happens there.
Princess's best friend is a fellow princess who is part Russian. She just loves her little friend. When we went to America this winter, princess suffered from culture shock and would wail that she wanted to go back to school to see her friend. We think that if she missed school that much in America, she must really like it.
On Children's Day they had a big show. It was 2 hours long and the teachers did dances too. It was very cultural. Princess and her fellow princess apparently didn't like the spot light as much as the teachers wanted. Her teacher said about a week before the show, "we wish she would dance like the other children. " It was about that time, that princess became distraught at bedtime when we put in Enya. She'd heard Enya forever and we couldn't understand why all of a sudden it was "the scary music" . At the big performance, her class did a dance to an Enya song that begins with thunder and the Aiy Ayi Aiiiiii chant. The princesses were given the job of running across the stage during the thunder and pretended to yell "Ai Ayi Aiiii" and there was big thunder and the stage was dark with flashes of light. I think she maybe afraid of Enya for life. The rest of the class did a very well rehearsed dance to the rest of the song, while the princesses played off stage somewhere.

After the big show, Princess in Pink, fellow Princess in White

Princess has 1 week left of kindergarten.

Chinese kindergarten

Harbin, China