As we have worked with a Chinese school and my students have written a blog about KaiKai’s and XinXin’s visits – dolls we got last year as a present from Zhongguancun nro 4 primary school – my students’ parents decided to organize our own Chinese New Year party. The evening was a real success! First we had Chinese meal and green tea. One mother even made  real, traditional New Year’s dumblings to us. Of course we ate with chopstics!

At my classroom students gave their performances to parents. We also did Eye protection rehersals all together; we learned this from Aleena last year. Then we had a visitor from Confucius Institute University of Helsinki, Mr. Xinsheng Li gave us a short lecture about Chinese calligraphy. Our last visitors gave us a kungfu-show – for me it was a bit scary, but my students really enjoyed the show. What an evening we had! Have a good rooster’s year!

BR, Raini/SYK

The second schoolweek at SYK started with an idea of our mutual world and its’ many stories. In my classroom 28 students from different grades concentrated on China. My students did big posters about pollution in China, about Beijing and Shanghai and also about Chinese New Year. We drank tea everyday, we tasted noodles (and of course learned to use chopstics), we listened Chinese music, ate fortune cookies, wrote Chinese characters, decorated the whole classroom with paperlanterns and papercutting; older students even wrote Chinese calligraphy to  decorate our frontdoor with traditional couplets.

Students together prepared a perfomance to other students. First every visitor was given an airmask, that was because of the pollution in Beijing area on December 2016. Then my students told visitors what kind of towns Beijing and Shanghai are and what is the New Year in China like. At the end of their show students made a shadow play about 12 Chinese Zodiac Animals. Before our guests left they were given a red envelope: one won 8 euros. And as we know eight is a lucky number in China.

During this week students learned a lot about China. I must thank to my colleagues in Beijing, they helped me a lot by sendind addresses to useful websites, sending Power Point -presentations about Tea, traditions, Chinese couplets etc. It is fine to continue cooperation with Chinese colleagues this way. Thank you Aleena, Sienna, Gao JingJing, Song and Cherry!

BR, Raini / SYK

We have been extremely busy for the last 6 months due our new school buildingproject. Our new school was ready just before christmas and we started our school year in a brand new building at 9th of january.

In the building there are many different partners, we have school classes from 1-6 at the moment, but we´ll have also classes 7-9 in three years. Preschool works at the same premises as well as youth centre, library and child health centre.

Our new sportshall is total of 970 cubic metres, and can be divided in three parts. WomanVolley, the women’s volleyball team will have their home games in our hall.

Our crafts classroom is extremely well equipped with 3D-printers and laser cutters. We will use Arduino as part of our craft projects. I will tell you more after our grand opening at 14th of february. We are quite busy at the moment with arrangements of the opening fest. Finnish minister of education will be giving a speech at the party. Here is some photos included from the first 3 weeks of studying in our new school. You can also check our schools pages in facebook, by looking Ounasrinteen Koulu.

Happy but exhausted Juhana