TRIP TO CHINATOWN 2023

5th Grade Trip to Flushing Chinatown 2023
Teachers: David Schultz, Wei Huang, Jingwen Cai

On Saturday April 29th, 2023, the North Shore FLES (Foreign Language in Elementary School) - Mandarin team led 100 students and family members on a cultural excursion to the western hemisphere's largest Chinatown, the Queens Flushing Chinatown.  Envisioned as an opportunity to connect their world language learning to the target language, culture and community, our learning community realized this vision with grace, cheer and open minds.  

On that rainy spring Saturday morning, the district's three FLES-Mandarin teachers, Jingwen Cai, Wei Huang, and David Schultz, met students and families at the Port Washington LIRR station and gathered everyone into two train cars reserved just for the group.  As they “choo-choo ’ed” down the tracks to Flushing Main Street, students were encouraged to look out the windows and notice how the landscape changed from suburban to urban, and the signs on the buildings changed from English to the many languages of the “World’s Borough”, Queens.  

Upon arrival at Flushing Main Street station, the giant group was led through the bustling, multi-cultural streets to the commercial center of Flushing's Chinatown, the New World Mall.  They then made their way to the third floor of the mall to eat the traditional Chinese brunch feast, Dim Sum, at the Royal Queen Restaurant. There they ate delicious and exotic treats, many of which were authentic dishes they had never even seen before, only to be found in Chinatown.  They also sang Karaoke in Mandarin, while our district Mandarin instructors guided them on how to use chopsticks, how to say the names of the delicious dishes, and talk about their favorite foods in the target language. 

Following the dim sum feast, the group was led to the first floor of the mall.  There they participated in a scavenger hunt, filling out a form which required them to locate and describe each food in Mandarin to complete the hunt. After completing the scavenger hunt in record time, Students and Families were treated to Bubble Tea - the tasty tea beverage from Taiwan. Finally, they returned to the train station to take the train back to Long Island, sipping their bubble teas and delightfully chatting about their “world” travels embarked on that morning. 

Many of our students have never even taken a train before, let alone visited the cultural wonderland that is Flushing Chinatown. The look of wonder in their eyes, and smiles on their faces, belied the excitement and enrichment that took place on that day.  It was truly an experience of transferring their knowledge and skills to real life, recognizing the Chinese characters on the store fronts and interpreting the Cultural trademarks that entered their ears and eyes and noses, which they had been learning about for so many years in our district's FLES-Mandarin program.