Teacher's Guide
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Celebrate the Year of the Sheep with The Wing! TEACHER’S GUIDE Journey with Newspapers In Education and Wing Luke Museum to learn how different Asian Americans celebrate the New Year. 121110886_04 INTRODUCTION This Wing Luke Museum teacher’s guide accompanies Chapter 1–3 of the three-week series in The Seattle Times. Journey with Newspapers In Education and Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience and learn about New Year celebrations for Asian ethnic communities in the Pacific Northwest. Families in these communities have maintained some of the cultural traditions and celebrations of their ancestral homelands while living here in Seattle. One of the most important celebrations for Asian Americans is New Year’s. You will learn about some of the customs for the Korean New Year, the Chinese Lunar New Year and Chaul Chnam Thmey, the Cambodian New Year. Students will also have the opportunity to discuss and share their own family and cultural traditions, and to dive into deeper discussions and writing assignments regarding the history of Asian immigration, culture, food, celebrations, traditions and cultural stereotypes in the of Asian and Pacific Islanders in the American media. NOTE TO EDUCATORS The first section of Lessons 1–3 were written for K–5th grade classes and are extensions of the articles printed in The Seattle Times on Jan. 30, Feb. 6 and Feb. 13, 2015. The second sections of Lessons 1–3 and Lessons 4–6 were written at a 4th–9th grade level and refer back to the article series on Asian New Year’s printed in January, 2012. The 2012 series is posted at seattletimes. com/nie. Teachers of all grade levels are encouraged to modify the guide to fit the needs of their individual classes. Information on the Series/Dates You can visit the NIE website (seattletimes.com/nie) to find the exact location and publishing dates of these pages in the newspaper. Have students take notes from the in-paper content each week to use in combination with this guide. The Seattle Times Newspapers In Education (NIE) To enroll in The Seattle Times NIE program and receive free access to the electronic replica (e-Edition) of the newspaper, lesson plans and curriculum guides, as well as the in-paper content for this guide, please email [email protected] or call 206.652.6290. TABLE OF CONTENTS Lesson 1 Cultural Ties to Food Lesson 2 Cultural-Based Vocabulary Lesson 3 Cultural Celebrations Lesson 4 Cultural Traditions Lesson 5 Cultural Stereotypes in the Media Lesson 6 Asian Pacific American Immigration Appendix A Brief History of Asian Immigration to the United States Mainland 2 LESSON 1: CULTURAL TIES TO FOOD SECTION 1 This lesson was written for classes in grades K–5. Pre-Reading Discussion Ask students the following questions to help them think about the significance of their own celebrations. Then read Chapter 1 of the NIE Asian New Year article series, printed on Jan. 30, 2015 on Korean New Year celebrations. 1. What is your favorite celebration? 2. Why do you and/or your family celebrate this occasion? 3. What types of activities happen for this celebration? 4. Are there any special foods that are a part of this celebration? 5. People whose families, parents, grandparents, or ancestors have come to the United States from Korea are called Korean Americans. Can you find Korea on a map of the world? Read chapter 1 on Korean New Year from Jan. 30, 2015 Post-Reading Discussion and Activities We learned about Korean New Year and how it is celebrated in the United States by Korean Americans. 1. When do most Korean Americans celebrate New Year’s Day? 2. What types of activities happen on New Year’s Day for Korean Americans? 3. What is one of the most important aspects of New Year’s for Korean Americans? 4. What do children often get after they do the “sebae” (or formal bow) to their elders? 5. What does your family do to celebrate the New Year? To learn more about Korean Americans, here is a book list compiled by Benling Wong, a librarian for the Seattle Public Library system. Korean American children’s books “Clara Lee and the Apple Pie” Dream by Jenny Han “Cooper’s Lesson” by Sun Yung Shin “Dear Juno” by Soyung Pak “Good-bye, 382 Shin Dang Dong” by Frances Park “The Name Jar” by Yangsook Choi “Project Mulberry” by Linda Sue Park “Tall Boy’s Journey” by Joanna Halpert Kraus Korean American teen books “The Fold” by Na An “Good Enough” by Paula Yoo “Necessary Roughness” by Marie G. Lee “Slant” by Laura E. Williams “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” by David Yoo 3 LESSON 1: CULTURAL TIES TO FOOD SECTION 2 Activities in this section were written for grades 4–9. Use Chapter 2 from the 2012 NIE Asian New Year article series with this lesson. In Chapter 2, students learn about celebrating New Year’s through the eyes of Jay J. Koh, who was born in Korea and moved with his family to America when he was a child. This chapter focuses on food and how it’s strongly connected to family and cultural celebrations. Food can be seen as a “family tree” of delicious cuisine, an important legacy of food that can be passed down from one generation to the next, connecting the past and present. Pre-Reading Discussion Please create a worksheet with the following questions and appropriate space for student answers. Have students take 10–15 minutes to write a journal entry for the following questions: 1. In your own family traditions, when are special meals prepared for close family and friends? What do you remember about the meal(s) you had during these events? What made them extra special? 2. Food is powerful. It brings people together, connects cultures, ethnic identities and good memories. What are the smells in your family’s kitchen that bring back the most memories? Why? 3. Write a list of “All-American” foods? Why are they connected to being American (for example, hot dogs at a baseball game)? 4. Why are family and food connected? 5. What are your favorite family foods? Are they made frequently, or are they prepared only on special occasions? Are they connected to your culture? 6. Are there any special recipes that have been passed down from elders in your family? What are they? 7. Interview a family member about what they remember about the special foods they ate when they were young. • What smells can they still remember? • What were their favorite foods that were prepared? • Did they bring that tradition to their own family and continue to have these same foods in their home now? Why or why not? Compare and Contrast Activity Please make a worksheet with a graph labeled: New Year’s Cultural Cuisine Comparison Chart with separate graphs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cambodian and My Own Cultural Foods—with space to list the different foods and what traditions and symbols the food has, if any. Review the three articles from 2012 posted at seattletimes.com/nie so that you will be able to fill out the graph for the different ethnic groups. *This information references the 2012 series of Friday, Jan 13: Chinese/Japanese New Year story; Friday, Jan 20: Korean New Year story; and Monday, Jan 23: Cambodian New Year story. Chinese Children are given pieces of candy as soon as they wake up on New Year’s Day (so they have sweet things to say in the New Year). Chinese pastries and jai are also among the traditional foods of New Year’s. Other traditional foods are: • Mustard greens for long life • Whole chicken symbolizing wealth for the whole family • Fish balls, shrimp balls and meat balls for success in educational pursuits 4 LESSON 1: CULTURAL TIES TO FOOD Japanese In the Japanese culture, people get together to pound mochi in preparation for the New Year and eat mochi soup (eaten with kamaboko or fish cake) on New Year’s morning. Other traditional foods are: • Sake, juubako zume, beans for good health, fish roe for prosperity, dried squid for happiness Korean Fruit, hangwa (a traditional Korean snack), ttokkuk (rice cake soup), galbijjim (rib stew), japchae (noodles with meat and vegetables), Korean-style pancakes, and various types of fish and wild vegetables are all prepared for Korean New Year’s celebrations. Rice sweets filled with black and sweet bean and sweet sesame fillings are also eaten for New Year’s. “First of all, you have to eat ttokkkuk, ttok is the rice cake and kuk is the soup. You have to eat this rice cake soup in order to age one year.” Cambodian “One of the special foods, onsom, is sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves and tied with string.” Another is a fried dough called ginger dessert. For lack of translation, there are also fried cookies called nom kgnay. These sugar-glazed cookies are made from rice flower in the shape of ginger root—they have no ginger inside. For the main meal, there are typically five or more dishes that are made to share with families. One is a noodle dish called chha masseur. Chha masseur is fried clear noodles with different kinds of mushrooms, onion, rehydrated banana flowers, ground pork, seasoning and topped with cilantro. Other dishes include: different varieties of Cambodian soups with a medley of vegetables, herbs and proteins; broiled and salted dehydrated fish; marinated grilled chicken, and of course, steamed jasmine rice. As Phala Chea’s family grew over the years into a bigger extended family, each of them was assigned to bring a couple of dishes to the family potluck.