2/12-2/18/2024 for the week of the Lunar New Year, we shared the cultural significance of the world-renowned event with our students.
The Lunar New Year has many aliases. It’s known as the Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year, and the Spring Festival. As the Chinese New Year, it shows a strong connection to China and its traditions.
This year, we gave our students the opportunity to experience some of these traditions firsthand. They all very much enjoyed these activities.
Calligraphy: Our students were given Chinese characters to write in relation to the theme of this Chinese New Year. They wrote the characters “Chun” meaning “Spring,” “Fu” meaning “Good Luck,” and “Long” meaning “Dragon.” Each character came with step-by-step directions on how to be written on a grid.
Paper Cutting: In Chinese culture, it is common for everyone to make decorations by hand. Using a premade stencil, our students cut out the character “Chun” on a paper in the shape of a Chinese dragon. This was entertaining but very time consuming.
Dumpling Wrapping: Making dumplings are a cornerstone of Chinese culture. We devised a way of teaching students how to wrap dumplings without wasting ingredients. By using Playdoh, students could experiment with making different shapes of dumplings without worrying about messing up. The main designs students could make were “Big Belly, Half Moon, and Chinese Gold Ingot.”
Chinese Jump Rope: This is a very popular game in China. In this game you stand in between two bands stretching out in front and behind you. The goal is to jump on, off, right, left, inside and out from the bands in a fixed order. If you do it well, the bands will be raised a little bit each time.
Our students really enjoyed the activities. They treated it like a reward for a day of hard work. After over an hour of training, many of them were able to relax with the activities and treated them like a meditative experience. Thank you for experiencing our culture alongside us. We look forward to celebrating next Chinese New Year together!
