Over the past several months, I’ve been working on putting the Museum Bento cases together and I’m happy to say that the Monkey King case is almost complete! I’m still writing up the Teacher’s Guide and am testing all of the activities but I hope to have everything completed by the end of February. The Monkey King case has some really unique items that I think students will enjoy. In addition to a Monkey hand puppet and a shadow puppet, I’m also excited to share some beautiful dough figurines of the Journey to the West crew sculpted out of glutinous rice flour. This is a very old art form with a history of over 1,000 years. One of the accompanying activities is to have students sculpt their own figures  from dough. I’ll post my attempts to make my own Monkey King figure out of rice dough in a future post.

In addition to the dough figurines, kids can also make their own opera masks, participate in a play, listen to “monkey music,” build a kite, and more.

Monkey King is a beloved figure throughout Asia and I hope his mischievous, endearing antics will appeal to students of all ages (teachers, too)!