Children's Day (Catching up on my China days)

So in China we celebrate everything and everyone.

We celebrate Teachers.

Parents.

Women.

The Moon.

The New Year.

And this week we celebrated Children.

And it was awesome.

And it was probably the most stressful week in their lives they've had, but also one of the happiest.

First, the weeks of preparation that have led up to it.  They've been learning their performances and dances and speeches to perform at the English Performances for Children's Day.

They had to do art projects and put their homework on display.

They gave up their recesses some days to practice their English lines or learn choreography.

And their teachers facilitated all of this.

(Enter the time of life of All of my co-teachers being ridiculously stressed out to the point of tears and collapse.)

The Foreign Teachers (Me and my team) were invited to perform a dance to open the festivities.

Which, since our school has split into three competitive departments and we all teach in different ones, we all had to do the performance at the opening of all three department's performances.

So we danced.  Jenessa and Alex (and with help from Laura and myself) assembled and mashed the music and choreographed the dance.  We all learned it, found costumes, made props, and applied stage makeup...

And performed to much confusion (and enjoyment) from a whole crowd of parents and students and fellow teachers.  Yay!

Here is a previous performance of ours that will give you an idea of what this was like.  Credit to my teammate Laura Love for posting it on Youtube for all of us to remember and enjoy again and again...
Mashup of Call Me Maybe and One Direction from our English Festival performance on the stage at Shanxi Modern Bilingual School.  The voice you hear in the video is one of my favorite co-teachers, Miss Sky.
Hope you enjoy =)