Every week in July, we’ll bring the parents of Beijing their very own summer camp curriculum. We’re keeping it truly simple, uncomplicated, and as inexpensive as possible so choose activities a la carte or follow the entire week’s agenda – whatever helps!

This week, our theme is Life Skills: Cooking. I love talking about food and cooking with kids. It builds so many incredible skills such as math, science, nutrition, and financial planning. Here is a suggested event schedule but don’t overthink it and as always you can ask for help and support in our DIY Camp Group (scan the QR code at the bottom of this article to join if you haven’t already).

Monday: Cooking Class

Start by getting inspired. Check out a kid-friendly cooking class at a place like Black Sesame Kitchen or The Hutong. If you would rather learn from the comfort of your own kitchen, there are literally thousands of free kid cooking videos on streaming platforms.

Tuesday: Nutrition and Meal-Planning

Cooking is a great way to teach kids about healthy eating and balanced nutrition. Talk about how a healthy plate has all the colors of the rainbow and make an old-school collage! Take all your old magazines and let the kids cut out pictures of food they think looks both yummy and healthy.

Now that they are inspired, have them plan a meal they would like to cook for the family. Look up recipes for the things they want to make.

Wednesday: Grocery List and Budget

Pull out those recipes from yesterday and take inventory of what you already have in the house, then make a grocery list.

Have your child plan a budget for the meal. What do they think it will cost?

Ask them to make sure they have the cooking tools they will need as well. If a recipe calls for an immersion blender but you don’t have one, help them come up with solutions. Is there room in the budget to buy one? Is there a similar recipe that doesn’t need that tool? Will a regular blender work?

Thursday: Grocery Shopping

Head to the store with your list and budget in hand and help them find their ingredients. This is a good time to talk about why some products are more expensive than others. Branding and marketing, fresh produce versus frozen or canned? What do they think is worth paying extra for and where is it better to save money?

Friday: Let’s Cook!

Today they will cook a meal and serve it to their family or friends! As with any project, help them self-evaluate. What went well? What can they be proud of? Did they learn anything new? Would they do anything differently next time?

We would love to see what your child came up with. Join our WeChat group and share pictures or videos by scanning the QR code below.

KEEP READING: Download the Jingkids DIY Summer Camp Calendar!

Photos: Pexels

Even though we’re still held up at home, quarantined from the rest of the world, things are slowly starting to get back to normal. Well, normal-ish. While the kids aren’t back to school as originally planned before the Coronavirus outbreak, they are starting to go back to their schoolwork.

Teachers and staff at international schools all over Beijing have been working tirelessly to create e-learning platforms for their students. But how does e-learning work and can it be applied to every subject?

We interviewed AISB School- Hope International’s Head of School Mr. Randal Eplin on their process of creating a productive e-learning syllabus for their students.

How has your staff been handling the current outbreak?

As we come back to work from the Chinese New Year holiday, I can honestly say that our teaching staff is ready to engage and work diligently in the midst of the novel coronavirus outbreak here in China. The faculty and staff at AISB School- Hope International (HIS) are highly committed to meet the learning needs of our students, and they have been working for several weeks now, even before the required date to return to work.

Are your teachers still in Beijing or have they returned to their home countries?

We have invited our entire community to make decisions that focus on their personal safety of themselves and their loved ones. At this point, we trust our community members as they make good decisions to keep themselves safe and secure during this challenging time. No matter where faculty and staff are in the world, they are all committed to delivering instruction where ever they are in the world.

Have you had similar experiences in the past?

I was working at the International School of Estonia many years ago during the SARS outbreak, and at this time, our school developed an online e-learning platform in case we needed to deliver instruction online. This experience has helped me in the planning and implementation of our HIS e-learning initiative.

What has HIS planned in terms of e-learning?

Our goal with the HIS e-learning platform is for students to learn. As simple as that sounds, it takes a dedicated and hard-working staff to achieve. Our goal is to meet all of our students, from preschool through grade twelve, at their instructional level. We are doing this by helping our teachers to plan manageable and relevant instructional tasks.

What platform will you be using?

There are many platforms that can be used for e-learning. The criteria that we are applying is to implement something that works seamlessly in China, and something that students can easily access and use. We are committed to finding, using, and changing the platform(s) we are using that fit this criteria.

Has it been difficult for the teachers to revise their syllabus for e-learning?

At HIS, we take pride in being what I call a learning organization. As a learning organization, our teachers embrace this challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow in different ways in order to deliver the best instruction that they can during this time. It is exciting to see teachers work together to learn and grow and make e-learning work for our students at HIS. The level of the dedication that our teachers have is humbling and encouraging.

How are your students handling the current situation?

Actually, I think that students are handling this situation better than all of us. We are serving a “wired generation” of learners who are often times more comfortable with technology than we are. The students at HIS are highly engaged and they are completing assignments and continuing to do their very best at this time.

We look forward to putting this outbreak behind us, but until that time, we are dedicated to providing the very best learning through our newly developed HIS e-learning platform.

 

At this time HIS hasn’t announced an official return date for their students and faculty but the school will continue to educate and inspire its students through e-learning for as long as it takes.

Photos: AISB School- Hope International, nebraskapta.org, skillmile.com, transferoflearning.com, gofluent.com

This is my daughter’s question to me every Wednesday afternoon when she has half a day off from her kindergarten at the French International School. It’s a mystery to me why they only mandate half-days for the little ones mid-week, but I’m lucky enough to have a freelance schedule that I can control. I’ve made it work. Now, Wednesday afternoons are when we play “the student game.”

In this game, I pull out various work sheets or alphabet games from my stash usually reserved for my actual collection of private students. You see, one of my freelance jobs is being a home tutor and many of my students aren’t much older than my five-year-old daughter. Testing out learning materials on my child whose native English is already better than my students’ English is, well, great for me. A nice bonus! And, since my daughter’s education is mostly happening in French, this weekly ritual is helping me take some responsibility for giving my kid a basis in English too.

But, let’s not misunderstand my role here. I firmly don’t want to home school my children. I love my kids very much but I also love my time away from them. Honestly, even though there are rewarding moments in these Wednesday afternoon sessions, I find them sometimes trying.

You see, my son is still at home full-time. He’s only 3 and starts kindergarten in the fall. So, if the materials I pull out aren’t “fun” enough, both my kids complain. And their different levels of knowledge and abilities also create conflicts. If she can complete a task but her brother can’t, then my son gets frustrated. Or, if her brother’s activity is more “fun” because “he gets to do more coloring” (for example), she immediately voices her dissent. It is a constant negotiation.

But she is learning. Slowly. She knows all her letters and can tell me what sounds they make. Though she has limited patience with reading activities, she expresses bubbling joy when she deciphers a word.

All in all, I take this position: I’m her mother, not her teacher. She has teachers at school and will have many more as the years pass by. For now, I offer fun weekly sessions in the way of “student games,” but I don’t push.

In my opinion, the same way that all able-bodied babies eventually learn to walk, all kids placed into a school system will eventually learn to read, just at different rates. We can monitor their progress to make sure they’re on track, but we, as parents, shouldn’t be stressed about making it happen sooner than later. Once they learn, this skill isn’t going to magically be unlearned. I am not even a little bit worried about her. One day, I predict I will have trouble tearing her away from her book to join us at the dinner table. I look forward to that problem.

Until then, I let my kids lead. If she wants to play the “ABC Games”, we play those. The “Numbers Games”? No problem. If she wants to read a book together and then talk about it, we do that. And everything she wants to do, her little brother wants to do too, so it’s perfect. My goal is to keep both my kids excited about learning for as long as possible—hopefully their whole lives. It must be fun, not work. Ever.

Because, after all, it’s called “the student game.”  They’re our Wednesday afternoons of learning fun in whatever way they play out.

About the Writer
Ember Swift is a Canadian who has been living in Beijing since 2008. She has a daughter, Echo (5), and a son Paz (3). She spends a lot of time on stages making original music, writing blogs and columns, doing voice over work, and advocating for vegetarianism, LBGTQ rights, and multilingualism. (www.emberswift.com).

Photos: congerdesign via Pixabay, courtesy of Ember Swift

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This article originally appeared on p 47 of beijingkids August 2017 issue.
Download the digital copy here.

Almost nine years ago, when finances and geography combined to preclude enrollment of my children Myles and Brigid in schools in Changping, our family made the commitment to homeschooling. I have chronicled this part of our life a few times in the pages of this magazine, most recently in the 2014 School Choice Guide. Using phrases like “education adventure” to describe our approach, I have tried to keep my kids interested in learning for learning’s sake.

At the beginning of this “education adventure,” I enthusiastically researched curricula and teaching methods, hoping to provide my kids the most creative, cutting edge instruction I could synthesize. I aspired to make extensive use of online resources like Khan Academy and virtual coursework.

Further, paper would be banished, or at the very least severely limited, in my innovative homeschool of the future, as all work could be completed on digital media of some sort. The idea of freeing our homeschool life from the unbearable weight of paper felt like a victory long before the battle had begun.

Once I was in the thick of it, actually working on educating my older child, I made a few difficult and humbling discoveries. One was that while I was able to piece together a sampler pack of educational philosophies, it would never be close to perfect for me or my son and eventually my daughter. Sometimes we would have an immediate hit, like how well my son took to Singapore Math. Other times I would flounder a bit, like my still ongoing quest for the right English grammar program.

However it was my attempt to escape paper-based learning that was the most futile of my early ambitions. It seemed so diametrically opposed to my wanting to give my kids a leg-up on their 21st century lives. However, I kept returning to the efficacy of paper media over digital for certain tasks. My kids simply remember content better if they read it in a paper book rather than an e-book or webpage. The physical act of turning pages seems to help their brains process and categorize information.

For learning spelling and grammar, I found copywork, out of fashion in American education since the decline of the one-room schoolhouse, to be an effective exercise for both of my kids. It doesn’t take many hand-written repetitions for my kids to be ready for the dictation test, but it still involves paper.

And further in my radical departures from the high-tech education I thought I would be providing my children, I have discovered that handwriting, and cursive in particular, was much more important than I would have believed at the beginning of this “education adventure.” Cursive is increasingly out of vogue back in the US as most schools have abandoned it in favor of emphasis on keyboarding. However, cursive remains an efficient (and even beautiful!) method for taking notes, composing first drafts, and rehearsing copywork.

We have not become complete Luddites, though. Some of my early techy plans have come to fruition. The kids have taken some online classes with remote teachers guiding their work, and Myles often checks ebooks out of our hometown library when our own collection is inadequate.

Both kids even have been working on elementary coding as well. While they both have learned a few visual programming languages, Brigid has taken more to Logo, a textual programming language developed decades ago by the University of California at Berkeley. Like the cursive copywork that fills part of her days, her preference for Logo is a throwback to a previous century. Our “education adventure” has a clear vintage bent.

Photo: Free-Photos via Pixabay

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This article originally appeared on p 47 of beijingkids August 2017 issue.
Download the digital copy here.

“Thank you for giving us a debriefing,” Canadian government employee Alexandre Germain told beijingkids when we wrapped up our chat about their most recent family travel. More than a year after driving 51,000 km and crossing nine countries in the Americas, Germain realized his family hasn’t had a chance to summarize their 12-month journey.

Dreaming of the Trip

Earlier in the conversation, Germain said that their travel was not enough. “Interestingly, it sounds like very long but to have that time to discover, homeschool, and get yourself into the culture is actually short.” But that short trip proved to be more valuable than anything the Germains have experienced.

Germain’s spouse, Melanie, called herself the “brains” of the travel as she laid its groundwork altogether. Owing from her own childhood experience of a family trip to Europe, Melanie said she promised herself that she would make a similar travel with her own family. When the spouse started dating, and later married, their similar interest in traveling made their bond stronger. “We have always worked as a team,” Melanie said, “[and]we have traveled a lot in the past 20 years together, and it’s working.”

Traveling across the Americas, as Germain said, was an idea that he and Melanie had mulled over for 10 years. The topic had many pauses and musings, like what type of mode of transportation to use. But ultimately, they settled on a land-based trip, taking their children as their primary consideration. “As the first baby came, the question was always, ‘How can we travel with the baby?’ When the twin followed, it was never an option that, “We’re not gonna do that [trip]as a family.”

No Turning Back

Five years prior to the travel, Germain bought a recreational vehicle the couple named “Winnie.” So endearing was the vehicle to Germain that he referred to Winnie as the sixth member of the family. In 2015, the couple finally took a sabbatical year and embarked on the trip in the middle of summer. They set off for Alaska in July, traveling to the western edge of continental North America from their home in Montreal, Canada.

As the day of the family travel went near, Germain said he felt it would take a toll on their children’s education. “We’re not teachers by trade or by any means but our kids [are]young enough that we can still teach them [the basics],” Germain said. Ultimately the couple used a homeschool program by the Centre National d’Enseignement à Distance, an agency under the French Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Research. That allowed them to use educational materials during the entire journey. Aside from that, Germain shared his background in mathematics and the sciences with his kids; Melanie, who studied criminology, taught their children history and languages, including French and Creole.

That one year of homeschooling, or rather “motorhomeschooling,” was stressful for the couple. But not having a specific itinerary proved to be beneficial and reinforced the education of the three children. The Germains visited museums and historical places, and met other families and kids as they traveled all the way to Alaska, several western US cities, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Belize, then back to Montreal via eastern US.

Tracing the journey. The Germains’s travel from Quebec down to Costa Rica took one year in mid 2015 to 2016.

“What seemed to be probably the most stressful thing turned out to be one of our most positive experiences. Teaching your own children was an amazing feeling. From not understanding a concept to acquiring and using that concept and being able to explain and apply it in real life, it’s amazing. From the first to the last day [of homeschooling], the growth of our children was evident,” Germain said.

Children’s Verdict of Homeschooling

The young Germains, now 12-year-old Maelie (pronounced as Miley) and now 10-year-old fraternal twins Jacob and Edouard (pronounced similar to Edward) all described the homeschooling as “weird” but ended up liking it. “It was cool because not just learning about it but going to a museum where [we saw]what we learned was really cool. It was really fun,” Edouard added. Meanwhile, Maelie, who had been shy at first opened up with a big smile when she shared her experience. “Since there were not a lot of students, it’s really easy [to learn]. So if I don’t understand something, they tell me, and if I already know this, we pass it. So it’s much quicker.”

“It was kind of getting fun exploring new places … we wrote a journal at the beginning of the year and we liked it,” Jacob said. That journal contained all of their experiences, which they wrote down every night. Their parents checked the grammar and commented on the musings of their children. By the time they went home in May 2016, Maelie, Jacob, and Edouard all had three journals. Germain had kept a record of the whole trip, with whopping 12,000 photos and countless hours of footage.

Taking a break. The family regularly stops at certain points to visit museums and camp.

Towards the end of our conversation, Germain couldn’t help but reminisce. “[The homeschooling part of the travel] was meant to be at that moment. I’m glad we did it for a year. And then we got caught in the ‘real’ life routine.”

Three months after the trip, Germain was posted in Beijing. Since they needed to organize their new home, Germain said they never had the opportunity for closure. “To revisit our trip with beijingkids has stirred up more memories. Although talking about it had created a feeling that we finally had a debriefing, I think that when I [finish posting]our videos on Facebook to celebrate exactly one year of our return, it will be perhaps the end of it… and the start of planning our next one!”

See the Germains’s journey on Facebook here: https://m.facebook.com/Enrouteavecwinnie (requires a VPN service to see the link)

Featured photo by Uni You; other photos courtesy of Alex Germain

Finding the right school is often the top priority for families living in or relocating to Beijing. But education in the capital comes at a cost.

Many larger companies offer full school funding for employees’ children as part of their relocation packages, meaning that money is no barrier to the top international schools. But not all are so fortunate. Some may choose to simply pay the fees out-of-pocket, while others look to local schools, homeschooling, and different sources of financial assistance to mitigate the cost of education. We spoke with four families about their solutions to the school funding conundrum.

Homeschooling: The Ambrose Family

Yearly Spend
Art lessons- RMB 3, 000
Sports programs- RMB 4, 000
Chinese lessons- RMB 3, 000
Events at The Bookworm- RMB 1, 500
Books (first two semesters)- RMB 7, 300
Total: RMB 18,800 (excluding cost of miscellaneous equipment and Jennifer’s time)

Jennifer Ambrose relocated to China from the US in 2006. A columnist for beijingkids, she has two children with her husband Randy: 10-year-old Myles and 5-year-old Brigid. She homeschools both of her children at the family home in Changping outside North Sixth Ring Road.

Why did you decide to homeschool your children?
I was always curious about homeschooling, mostly because I have quite a few friends that homeschooled in the US. I didn’t think we would actually do it ourselves but my husband’s compensation package [did not]include school tuition. That’s when I stopped just toying with the idea and [started]considering it more seriously.

There’s often a feeling of being on a learning adventure together. Sometimes, all it takes is the three of us gathered around a book, learning some weird and wonderful fact about dinosaurs, or one of the kids to ask a simple question, and we all fall into the rabbit hole as we pursue the answer.

Was the cost of the alternatives a factor in your decision?
Cost was definitely a factor, but also the flexibility of schedule. Currently, my husband’s job requires him to visit other cities in China [as well as]the US and Europe. Since we aren’t tied to a school calendar of testing and holidays, the kids and I often travel with him. It’s an opportunity we have to take advantage of while we can.

Were the costs as expected and do you have any financial tips for families considering homeschooling?
I was prepared for the books and supplies cost but families that aren’t able to make trips to their home countries to bring back books may need to consider the cost of shipping. For [anyone]wary of the expense of outside teachers, it is possible to work out arrangements with other parents to exchange talents. Right now I do this with a Chinese family in Changping. I tutor their son in English, and his mom spends that time playing with Brigid in Chinese.

How else do you share resources with other parents in the same situation?
Art is a subject that I have no idea how to teach or even guide. We’ve been lucky to be able to join up with other homeschooling families to share art teachers and we rely on Sports Beijing for our physical education. Myles plays baseball and Brigid plays soccer right now. The kids have their [training]and matches on the weekends, so during the week the kids are motivated to practice on their own at the park.

Additional Fees Explained (Well, Sort Of)
When choosing a school and planning for the academic years ahead, it is important to take into account all of the various fees that you may encounter. Schools may be relatively upfront about their fees, but there are often a number of hidden (or at least not well-publicized) charges. Here are some of the most common ones to keep in mind.

• Lunch fees. These can vary from RMB 15-50 per day and may be paid for monthly, yearly, or through a top-up card system.
• Bus/transportation fee. Anywhere from RMB 3,000-13,000 per year depending on the school and the distance required. Some schools charge this monthly.
  
• Application/new student fee. Normally between RMB 1,000 and 2,000 for international schools.
• Deposit. Can be as high as RMB 20,000 and some schools require the same amount again at the beginning of each year.
• Uniform fee. Can vary from approximately RMB 500 to 3,000 per year. Students can usually re-use them from year to year as long as they still fit and are in good condition.
• Donation fee (zanzhu fei). A phenomenon found in local schools where access to the most popular institutions is secured with a “donation.” Reportedly as high as RMB 30,000.
• Zafei. To complicate matters further, many of the above charges are rolled into the all-encompassing zafei (“miscellaneous fees”), especially at local schools. This ambiguous term seems to differ in definition (and price) between every school that charges it and may, or may not, include electricity/water fees (shuidian fei, 彊든롤) and textbook fees (shufei, 蝎롤)
• Capital levy fee. In the context of international schools, this fee normally applies to money used towards buildings, facilities, and facilities. Schools differ in their definitions, though it is usually in the region of RMB 10,000-20,000 a year.

When beijingkids spoke to Ma Fei, a lawyer specializing in education, he had a very different definition of the capital levy fee, describing it as an optional fee for primary or middle school students either (a) choosing a school in a different district than where they live or (b) who do not have high enough grades.

The moral of the story is this: Ask the schools you’re interested in to provide a full list of fees. We try to ensure that the schools featured in the listings pages of this guide provide a comprehensive overview of their charges, but there are not always set definitions of what many of the fees really cover. Each school configures their fees differently, so we advise you to be thorough in your research and assertive in trying to figure out just what you need to pay – and what you don’t.

Find the downloadable 2014-2015 School Choice Guide here.

Photo by Mitchell Pe Masilun

When we decided to homeschool our children for another year rather than send them to a local school, we were worried that the kids wouldn’t learn any Mandarin. What was the benefit of living seven years in China (and mostly in a remote corner of Beijing), if we weren’t going to take advantage of this opportunity to study Mandarin?

Over the years, we’ve contracted a Chinese teacher to work with Myles a few hours a week. We acknowledged that this workload could never lead to true bilingualism, but we hoped that he would at least become comfortable in a Chinese-speaking environment. His tutor and I could see his progress in his lessons, particularly with his writing. When it came to real-world situations, however, my son was reticent about speaking Chinese beyond revealing his name, age, and country of origin.

In the last year, we noticed a change in Myles’ approach to Chinese lessons. I had to nag him less frequently about completing his written homework; instead, he started begging to practice new characters after each session. He was also initiating conversations in Chinese with friends and sometimes even strangers on the subway.

The reason behind this change? Playing 植物大战僵尸 (Zhíwù dàzhàn jiāngshī).

Yes, it was Plants vs. Zombies and the vocabulary of vegetation and antagonism that re-ignited Myles’ interest in Chinese. Besides interacting with fellow gamers, not many of these words have much practical use or academic value. Myles, however, found that learning Chinese could help him connect with people who shared his pursuits – one of the purposes of language in the first place.

This path of study was an unusual one, but his teacher was all for it – even though it was outside the scope of the usual books and syllabi. Myles learned words like 玩游戏 (wán yóuxì) or “to play a game,” 蘑菇 (mógu) or “mushroom,” 爆炸 (bàozhà) or “to explode,” and 地刺 (dì cì) or “spike weed.” He excitedly used this new jargon without any prompting from me.

Since then, he has filled his notebooks with homework based on other subjects he enjoys, like the computer game Minecraft, which is known in Chinese as 我的世界 (Wǒ de shìjiè) or “My World.”

Of his own volition, Myles also started working on Chinese translations for words from his favorite book, The Hobbit. His eyes lit up when discussing the goings on in 霍比特人 (Huòbǐtèrén) with his friends, borrowing the Chinese translation for the eponymous movie released earlier this year. They would talk about the quest in the book to 孤山 (Gūshān), the Lonely Mountain, to battle the gold-hoarding dragon called 史矛革 (Shǐmáogé) or Smaug.

Seven years in China is too long a time not to develop some grasp of Mandarin. I knew that our tack with Myles would not lead to bilingualism, but I hoped to find a way of stimulating his curiosity and desire to learn and – most of all – to connect with other people. For now, that means more conversations about things like Plants vs. Zombies. I mean, 植物大战僵尸.

illustration by Sun Zheng.

This article originally appeared on p43 of the beijingkids July 2013 issue.

Check out the PDF version online at Issuu.com