Xīnnián kuàilè!

7/2/2022

Happy New Year of the tiger!

This past week we have enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year and this has brought with it some lovely moments.

We learned about the race to establish how the new year became named after each animals and then read and discussed how chinese new year is celebrated.

After reading the story of all the animals arguing, and subsequently having a race across the river to decide upon which animal would have the new year named after them, one child told me, ‘Well Fawzia, my sisters and I argue and then we all had a race and splashed in the bath, and the order is mummy, daddy, my sisters and then me, and I have the trophy.’ And then that opened the conversation up to other children telling me of their families having races and the order of finishers. It was very cute and lovely to hear how many of the children were champion swimmers. :-)

We talked about the year of the tiger and we tried to work out the animals for the years the children were born in; the children were born from 2017 to 2020 which means that we have roosters (2017), dogs (2018), pigs (2019) and rats (2020) in our midst. The beauty of it in seeing how different all the roosters, dogs, pigs and rats can be; even in the animal world there is uniqueness and individuality However some children insisted that they were not dogs, roosters etc and they were intact rabbits born in Africa.

We also spoke about lucky red envelopes and how children receive money in them. At this point, one child chipped in that they got a red envelope full of sweets and that when it is dark they go round to people's homes and get more sweets for their red envelopes. Hmmm... ’that sounds a bit like Halloween’ I commented. ‘Yes!’ And so began plenty of chat about what else the children would like in their red envelopes; at one point I had to intervene and ask how big these envelopes were as I think there had been mention of a bike in an envelope!

Everyone admired our vibrant red lanterns. One parent commented how joyful they were to see.

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