Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Waeeny's Chinese New Year experience :)

Hey! Its me, Waeeny Dessources, a fairly new Hester Street Collaborative intern. Recently, Yanely, Xing and I have been working on the Chinese New Year party activities and projects for the children. At first, we all sat down and brainstormed about which activities we would create that would interest a younger audience. Certain youth activities that we came up with included making masks, name tags, finger puppets, stamps, and lucky red envelopes; which were created to resemble the Chinese Zodiacs, especially the Golden Boar. The masks along with the nametags, envelopes, and fortunes were created using an Illustrator Program. For the masks, I drew half of the animal’s head on a sheet of paper using Adobe Illustrator, and created indicator lines so that the person making it would know to fold it in half and cut along the lines. Second were the stamps. After Yanely and I took a walk to Pearl Paint in search of linoleum and cutting tools, we returned to the office and copied the animal templates onto the linoleum. Soon after the pieces were carved out, wood was glued onto the back surface and therefore; creating a stamp. We created several of each animal so that the supply would be sufficient. It was quite an allusive experience due to the fact that so many children participated in the event and it caused me to realize that all the hard work paid off. As the festivities commenced, waiters and waitresses served exquisite Chinese cuisine as everyone took park in the tasting of the delicious dumplings. Planning the party and watching it become reality was undoubtedly a momentous experience for me. Not only did I learn about Chinese New Year while creating the activities, but I also had a load of fun taking part in the event. :)

Xing here!

Hey, Xing’s first posting here =D. We have been very busy at HSC lately because there were so many preparations that needed to be done for the Chinese New Year Celebration. Yanely, Wawa (Waeeny), and I were assigned series of projects to do before the big celebration. We had to come with different ways of fun things to do in relation to Chinese traditions, such as activities dealing with ancient Chinese zodiacs. Yanely worked on making finger puppets templates, Wawa did really cool masks, and I made many animal zodiac sketches that were later turned into labels and stamp designs. The stamps were really fun to make! Anyways, we also had lantern making, envelope making and cool facts about every single zodiac animals. We finally pulled everything off at the last minute and the party began. Very fun party! Most of the kids enjoyed the craft-making that we had prepared for them and the kids liked bunnies and dragons the most, which I thought was odd because all the others were very good too! The kids were hard to communicate with at first because they didn’t know what Chinese New Year was about and so we had to elaborate on that. Yanely was really good with the little kids but I don’t have much luck with them so this was a very good experience for me. It was frightening at first because I have never dealt with so many kids at once but nevertheless, it ended up fine. Phew =]. At the party, I helped the kids with making their own name tags and lucky red envelopes; and at the end, most of the kids knew their birthdays’ relation to what zodiac they are assigned to and the personalities of their zodiac signs. Our party with the kids went really well and one of the kids even made a name tag for Wawa =D. Wells, here are some pictures! Enjoy~
The room setup and our hard work on putting up the pretty lights. and look! there’s the minicake stand that everyone enjoyed eating. oh and there’s the kids making crafts =D
Sam making some lanterns….and a lot other crafts. She didn’t want to go home lol
the craft making station...there's alot of stuff going on there
US at work. (wawa, yanely, xing)

alrighty, ciao for now =]
-Xing

Monday, February 12, 2007






Hello! It's Fiona again! (booooooo! Where's Raymond?)
Waeeny, Xing, and Nelly prepared for the Chinese New Year party by making finger puppets.
Fiona ran an errand to the post office to deliver an important mail, while Stephanie and Kevin were silk screening T-Shirts samples. Zhoudi and Winnie were working on the fliers that will be handed out for the T-Shirts. Jennifer and Jeffery were cleaning up the basement and throwing out garbage.

Now here are some pictures :D