Chinese Culture Day

Our annual celebration of Chinese culture included demonstrations of traditional handcrafts, folk music, calligraphy, dancing and martial arts.  Students thoroughly enjoyed all the activities on offer.  They commented:

 "The erhu (chinese violin) is a chinese instrument which uses a bow that sits in between the 2 strings. It has a long history since it was invented over 4,000 years ago. Erhu have a small wooden sound box with snakeskin on the front and a pretty opening on the back to let the sound out but sometimes the erhu is made from a coconut. The neck of an erhu is long and thin with tuning stuff at the top.  The culture day was really fun and we had lots of funny and interesting moments. The erhu was really cool to learn about because some of us had never heard of it before."

"For the martial arts at the beginning was a briefing of different chinese weapons followed by a demonstration of said weapon. After weapon demonstrations we started a multi-step martial arts routine. We started slowly and increased speed as we learned the routine. It was tricky, but funny watching each other. There were animal based martial arts but not all were shown and most tried but not all succeeded.  We also learned some basic self defence. 3 of us got to stand up with the instructor and he showed us how to defend ourselves against different kinds of approaches."