Most Chinese enjoy eating mooncakes during the Mooncake Festival or Mid Autumn Festival. However, very few even adults would have closely seen how mooncakes are made, let alone making the mooncakes by themselves. In Breakthru Centre in conjunction with the Mooncake festival the children were not only shown how mooncakes are made but they themselves were given the opportunity to put their hands on making the mooncakes themselves. I guess these children never saw their parents making mooncakes at home since mooncakes are generally bought in shops rather than handmade at home.

So the children in Breakthru were very privileged to have a teacher guided them how to make mooncakes. With the help of some helpers they took turn to sieve the flour, added water to it and kneaded the dough. Then pandan syrup was poured on the dough to give it greenish colour and to add flavour to it. The red bean paste was then used as the filling for the mooncakes.

The most important lesson for the children is that they were given the chance to personally involved in the whole process. They put their hands on preparing the ingredients and had the satisfaction of seeing and eating the final products.

Yes, it would have been easy to buy ready made mooncakes from shop and gave them to the children. But then they would miss the whole experience of making them which is far more important than eating the mooncakes. And yes, their works were not perfect and sometimes it got messy as the flour was scattered on the table for example. Some children got impatient in waiting for their turn to get their hands on preparing the ingredients and they got annoyingly noisy. But a learning process never starts with perfection otherwise what is the purpose of learning when things are already perfect? The idea of learning is to start with imperfections, clumsiness, nervousness or even failures. But as the learning process continues things will gradually get better under the guidance of an experienced and patient teacher. And eventually, given enough time, the children will get it right. This is true not only in learning of how to make mooncakes but of all things which required going through a process of learning.

Indeed the teacher who taught how to make the mooncakes and the assistants who gave a helping hand to guide the children were very dedicated and patient in performing their tasks to maximise the learning input received by the children. Surely the next time they see or eat mooncakes these children will proudly say that they have learned to make them themselves. Not many children have the privilege of saying this.

Thanks to the wonderful and dedicated teachers and staff in Breakthru Centre, the children there added more skills and experience to their lives on a regular basis. This in turn will also add confidence for them to attempt to learn more new skills and gain new experience in the future.