I worked in a Chinese kindergarten and realized that the difference for western models was like water for wine.

Hi! My name is Anna, I’m originally from Russia, but I live in the Chinese province of Shanxi, and I’ve been teaching English in a kindergarten for 2 years. Every day, my 2 children and I, who also attend this same kindergarten, have to face cultural barriers and the strangest customs and habits possible.

I want to tell the readers of awesome.club how preschool students live in China. Sometimes it’s quite difficult, mainly because of the tough discipline, which leaves the boys wanting to hide under the bed. And at the end of the text, you will know why my youngest son was scolded when he said “bye” to his father.

Parents always want to give the best life for their children, so private kindergarten is the top choice of middle class citizens of this Chinese city. However, it is not a cheap whim: the annual value of this educational institution costs around 1.5 to 4 thousand euros (6.8 to 18 thousand reais) in the provinces, and from 4 to 6 thousand euros (18 to 27 thousand reais) in large cities.

For this price, children enter the “all-inclusive” program: 5 meals a day, transportation on the school bus, uniform, shoes, backpack, bed linen and a stack of schoolbooks in the most different colors, up to the size of the school. own child. It is only allowed to enter the preschool with a special card and at strictly specific times🇧🇷 After school, kids can do extracurricular activities for an additional fee, such as LEGO builds, bike rides, rollerblading, basketball or even science experiments.

To ensure that their children get into a good kindergarten, parents are ready to make any sacrifices. In large cities, there were cases where residents of some areas stood in queues for days waiting for the garden to open for the start of the school year. People simply pitched tents in front of the building until the doors opened for registration to begin.

By the way, the evaluation of a preschool does not depend much on its size or location. A private kindergarten may be relatively small, with a play area on the roof of a rented building, and this will not influence values. Our garden, for example, has 60 students, 20 in each classroom. And in each room there are normally 2-3 teachers and a nanny.

Most educators are women up to 30 years old. The age limit for nannies is 45 years old. This is because the work is physically heavy. It’s no use going to work “dressed up” — with a dress and hairstyle. The teachers here are more like older sisters: they all wear the same blouse or T-shirt, black pants and sneakers. Hair must always be tied back, and long fingernails can even lead to fines.

In the morning, children study Chinese, English, math, music, learn to read characters and recite poems. Teachers talk to students in 2 languages: Chinese and English. Children undergo an assessment every month and, if she has not absorbed the material sufficiently, the teacher is fined.

Once a month, children participate in group activities, from preparing national cuisine to pottery classes. Every season there is a mandatory event with parents: a trip to the bank, to the post office, to the farm, to the dentist, mountain climbing, fun in the park or a foam party on the kindergarten’s own territory.

I still remember how in my childhood, on hot summer days, the teacher would water us with the garden hose. Chinese children, meanwhile, have water pistols and foam guns. Some parents come to events with umbrellas to try to protect themselves from all the recreational “chaos”.

There are also fans of more active entertainment: some parents have already taken basins with water and created a real “water battle”. The teachers only had time to get the kids out of the way.

Chinese kindergarten allows children not to take off their street shoes, both in winter and in summer. During the summer, children wear lighter shoes and, at least that way, they don’t get too hot inside the daycare.🇧🇷 But it is quite common for children not to take off their winter coats inside the classroom. The reason is simple: many kindergartens in southern China do not have a heating system (we live in the North, so the indoor environment is warm even during winter).

Here they are also not used to using burrows (even if the temperatures are below zero). All the Chinese children will arrive with their ears red from the cold, but no one seems to be bothered to put dens in the children. My kids are the only ones who go from den to kindergarten during the winter.

I recently read an ad for parents and understood why children in China don’t often wear winter dens.

“The air temperature has dropped. Be sure to keep children’s bodies warm. Follow the ‘3 hot, 2 cold’ principle. We must warm the back, belly and feet.

By keeping children’s backs warm we protect them from the flu. 1/3 of the body heat should come out of the head. When it is overheated, therefore, heat transfer slows down. The child may have dizziness or even fainting, so it is important to keep a cool head.

Place your hand on your collarbone. If she is warm, then the child is dressed correctly.”

In kindergarten, children eat ordinary Chinese dishes, with only a minimal amount of seasoning, but still well seasoned. Juices are also not offered. A normal lunch consists of soup, rice or noodles, and sometimes bread to go with it. Just it.

First, they must eat the main course, and then “drink” the soup. Water is given just before they start their break. Therefore, many children eat spicy foods from the age of 2and every two weeks prawns appear on the menu.

Before each meal, the children have to put their hands in front of their chests and thank “in chorus” for the food.

In kindergartens, a lot of attention is paid to national traditions: during the winter solstice, everyone prepares small pastries stuffed with meat, and only then eats it. And on the early autumn holiday, teachers cut watermelons for the children, but they do it in such a way that the slices are round to resemble the sun.

March 21st. With the arrival of the spring equinox season, everyone is aiming to find “inner balance”. The most common entertainment on that particular day is try to balance raw eggs vertically in such a way that they do not fall🇧🇷 It takes a lot of patience and concentration to be able to do this.

It sometimes happens that parents take their children with a fever or the flu to preschool: the vast majority work and sometimes have no one to leave their children with. As a result, such school institutions do everything to prevent microbes from spreading and contaminating other children🇧🇷 In the vast majority of kindergartens, there is a health professional at the entrance: children are observed before entering the school’s territory. They examine the children’s throats with a flashlight to detect any redness.

Furthermore, doctors worry a lot about intestinal infections and so they put up posters in the kindergarten telling them how to wash your hands properly and keep your body clean in general.

Here they also don’t have the habit of taking many vaccines. Recently, I had to translate my children’s vaccination card into Chinese and I didn’t know how to translate “Tuberculin Test”, which is the diagnostic test to detect if a person has tuberculosis. They didn’t even understand what I was talking about and looked for information on the Internet. Then I found out that they just don’t do that kind of testing—they get the TB vaccine, but they don’t make the diagnosis.

Children like to play, eat and sleep in the same room, which has several small beds scattered around the corners. Bedtime is about an hour and a half. Some really sleep, others lie down resting and they don’t even make noise🇧🇷 Discipline here is very strict, so pillow fights and bed jumping are completely out of the question.

In some kindergartens, at the end of each week, all bedding, including mattresses and pillows, is taken home by parents, who must wash everything and return it to school afterwards.

The beds have yet another curious purpose: they are used during classes on safety rules.

Earthquakes are not uncommon in China. For that reason, kindergartens and schools have mandatory classes in which children are instructed on how to behave during a natural disaster, such as in the case of underground tremors. If there is a threat of a building collapsing, you must quickly go out into the street and cover your head with your hands. If the earthquake is mild, you can just hide under a table or bed.

Children also learn to protect themselves in case of fire. But they do it in a very realistic way. Teachers burn a smoke grenade: everything is covered in smoke, children must run around with wet towels covering their faces and some even cry in nervousness and fear. After the “training”, everyone listens to a lecture by a firefighter and a teacher. The exercise ends with all the children taking turns putting out the fire inside a barrel with a fire extinguisher.

In Chinese preschools, Children’s Day is celebrated as grandly as the New Year. Children from 2 to 6 years old in very elegant clothes shine in the halls of quite expensive hotels.

To perform on stage, children need to have a very flashy makeup and lots of glitter on their face🇧🇷 According to the parents’ opinion, the event is very cute and joyful. Girls get false eyelashes, put on eye shadow, mascara, blush and powder. Boys, on the other hand, don’t usually put on false eyelashes, but they do everything else.

It is worth noting that no…