To lead into the Beijing Olympics, today our homeschool group held a Chinese Cultural Day. Here is my little man dressed in a pseudo-Chinese costume.
The pants were my nieces karate pants from quite a while ago - the shirt was my creative effort on Sunday!
I took an old workshirt of Pete's as the base and cut a shirt to fit out of the material (keeping where the arms were sewn in). I used a pajama shirt of Billy's to trace around for the size, just adding seams. That was the easy part lol.
I'm not a great sewer, but I am amazed at the tips & tricks that are stored in my brain from watching my Mum - she has been sewing for a living since she was about 16. Anyway, I sewed it up - it went together *reasonably* well if you don't look too closely at whether the seams line up or trivial things like that lol. More importantly, it fitted..
Then I attempted to make a mandarin style collar to go on it - enter Google and I managed to approximate one! My main problem was that the back of the neckline wasn't quite round where I'd joined up a back seam, so it's pretty rough in places. But for a dress-up from a rather average sewer, I think it's pretty cool!
The buttons were from Spotlight - I went looking for those frog toggles, but when I found them I refused to pay $3 EACH for a dress-up costume. So these 'bamboo' ones looked good enough I thought..
So back to today. The kids dressed up in Chinese costumes, several of us organised Chinese activities to do (Chinese lanterns, Chinese calligraphy, making paper dragons, making a Chinese flag) that the kids all seemed to enjoy. Everyone took along a Chinese dish to share - the adventurous tried using chopsticks to eat with! We listened to a Chinese folk tale, listened to some Chinese music and the kids had a dragon parade with a couple of chinese dragons and the decorations they'd made.
It was a great day - rather exhausting to pack all of that into 3 hours - but a great way to learn a bit about China.
My camera batteries died before I took many photos, but hopefully I'll have some to share soon from one of the other Mums.
Next time we're celebrating the Olympics by having our own fun 'mini-olympics'!
2 comments:
Well done with the sewing, it looks great!
Don't know if you're aware of it but we can access the aspire school network resources which is the Australian Olympic Committee's national education program.
What fun!!! You did a great job with the outfit, and a day like that is great for learning. I think kids remember so much more like that than just reading out of a textbook.
lv,
Joy
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