Sauk Prairie Middle School & Memorial High School

4 February 2008

Today we visited Sauk Praire Middle School -- the students were quieter than I imagined. We gave our presentation to them to introduce the cranes and wetlands in China and play Jianzi, a traditional Chinese game (like hacky sack). Jianzi is made of bird feathers, it has a long history. They all love it and enjoy it very much.

We left one piece of Chinese student’s artwork here “The plum and the crane” as a good memory. The school is near the Wisconsin River were many bald eagles gather, so eagles can be seen everywhere. When we go out of the school, we are discussing that this is just as the crane in China. So maybe there are many interesting stories between people and nature all over the world that we can learn.

In the afternoon, we visited a Chinese language class at James Madison Memorial High School. All of the students in this class can understand Chinese. We find an interesting sentence on the door “please speak Mandarin." There are many traditional Chinese things in this classroom, we are surprised to see that, especially the teacher, who can speak quite good Chinese. Hu Yabin gave a lesson about cranes and wetlands in China. She is a biology teacher and she is from Beijing, so she teaches not only biology but Chinese in this class (ha ha). They all like Chinese culture and they ask many question about Chinese wetlands and conservation activities, and also some questions about the difference between Beijing and Madison.