Wednesday, November 7, 2012

G is for gōng fū 功夫


Many children in America knows about Chinese Kung fu from movies of Karate Kid or Kung fu Panda. But few of them know there are two major schools of martial arts: Shaolin and Wudang. Shaolin Kung fu is practiced by Shaolin monks and  Wudang was from Taoism and motivates inner-body exercises called Tai Ji. I showed this video by National Geographic about Shaolin Monks and they were surprised to see some of those monks are at the same age with them. 
We looked at the characters of Gong fu. The left part of Gong means work and right part means strength. Fu is an adult male standing. Everybody can say Kung fu panda in Chinese! 

We tried some Kung Fu Panda poses and they love it! We did the squatting position for one minute! They counted from 1 to 60 in Chinese.

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