The students of Minot Forest bid their Chinese compatriots goodbye Friday evening, at a special pizza party for the 16 visiting students.

The students are from the Graphic Communications School in Daxing Province, China, and are coming to the end of a 10-day visit to Minot Forest, their sister school. The program that brought over the students is conducted through Boston Ivy, which, said Wendy Wu, who works for Boston Ivy, is meant to foster a “sister school relationship.”

“We build that partnership through student exchange, and we also do teacher exchange,” Wu said. “We start at an elementary school level, because we saw so many high school exchanges, but never at an elementary school level. We thought, ‘Why don’t we give this opportunity to younger kids?’”

The program began at Needham in 2012, with only a little “hiccup” in the beginning.

“What surprised us was that [the students] kept in touch with each other for three years,” Wu said. “I think this group – they are having a very good experience here.”

This is Wareham’s first year in the program. Office of Beyond School Time Co-Director Maureen Manning is hosting two of the students herself, and said it has been a great learning experience for both the American and Chinese students.

“One of the boys, Alex, has brought his silk bottle gourd flute, and he was teaching that,” Manning said. “Also things like rainbow loom, and [three-dimensional] puzzles of Chinese pagodas … and also food-making. … The Chinese students would help prepare the dishes, and they would show our students, and our Wareham students would be showing the Chinese students what they like to eat.”

Manning also said the students have been sharing artwork.

“There’s just a lot of learning that’s going on,” Manning said. “We’ve made life-long friends in less than a week.”

Manning said she, Beyond School Time Co-Director Joan Seamans, and Superintendent Kimberly Shaver-Hood would be visiting Beijing, China, for a week for a signing ceremony meant to foster good relations and keep a strong tie to the sister school.

In addition to a pizza party, the students watched a video of a recap of their time at the school, and the Chinese students put on small musical performances. They also commemorated the night with a group picture of themselves and their host siblings.

“Even though I do this for a living … it’s still always surprising to see how moving it is when you see children playing and interacting without any care in regard to where they come from, or what language they speak,” Manning said.