Entertainment

This Saturday, take advantage of your beijingkids Club membership to get 50 percent off the ticket price at Sanlitun SOHO’s outdoor ice skating rink. For one day only, families can get in for RMB 15 per person (regular admission: RMB 30) by showing their beijingkids Club card at the door. Skate rentals are included in the price of admission.

Please note that this is a promotion, not an event managed by beijingkids.

Photo by jayhay2336 via Flickr

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Growing up in a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada, Rebecca Shatford was painfully shy. That started to change when she discovered drama classes at age 10. She liked the experience so much, she ended up going into acting in university. Since then, she has taught drama in countries like South Korea, Russia, and Thailand. Now, Shatford is the educational manager at Dreamaker (卓美教育), a drama education company based in Beijing.

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If you’re going to be in Beijing over the Chinese New Year holidays (like me), take the opportunity to visit a temple fair. Temple fairs (or miaohui) are traditional celebrations replete with religious ceremonies, folk performances, traditional crafts (such as paper cutting and scroll writing), vendors hawking toys and kitsch, and scrumptious snack stalls. They usually take place at temples and parks, but several international schools also organize their own. Click through for a rundown of 2012 temple fairs. Be prepared: temple fairs can get very crowded during the holidays.

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Before you embark on your holiday or before those fireworks start popping, stop by the Beijing City International School this Sunday for a sneak peek at Chinese New Year festivities.

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With some kids on holiday, and more about to take a break from school for Chinese New Year, the time is right to stock up on some educational, yet entertaining, math apps to help sharpen the skills of the young minds in the family.

The first app in our math roundup is Grow Your Garden by Learning Yard. This adorable app uses visual cues in the shape of water droplets to encourage kids to add and subtract the correct amount of water for each flower that they grow in their garden. Little by little, the plants get properly cared for and eventually fill your child’s garden. Reina (4.5 years of age) enjoyed solving the problems to get to the flowers, with only occasional assistance from mama and baba. Grow Your Garden is rated 4+ and is available for $0.99 for the iPhone and $1.99 for the iPad at the App Store.

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Tired of reciting the same old bedtime stories? Let your kids create their own!

With the Toontastic iPad app, children can use their imagination to create their own story with cartoon scenes, music and characters.

Kids learn about the five aspects of a story arc, choosing to work first on the setup, the conflict, the challenge, the climax, or the resolution. Next, kids can pick the setting of their story, be it a pirate ship or magic castle. Users can also imagine their own zany characters or adventurous settings using the illustration tools.

When animating the scenes, narrators can record their voice and make their characters come to life on screen. The scene is completed once background music is added. Once the story is done, it can be shared online with friends.

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Back in September, we took Reina to EE City at the Joy City Mall for her first round of on-the-job training (read that post here). She got to role-play as a firefighter, work in a mini-hotel, and care for a baby in the Beijing United Family Hospital-sponsored baby ward. Reina loved it, but after four hours of dealing with crowds and waiting in lines, we all felt worn out. So when we got invited to skip school for a day and hang out with some friends at Beyou World, I had mixed feelings about the prospect of another role-play adventure. This time, however, there was one critical difference; we went on a weekday.

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