Chinese New Year at Buckle My Shoe
January 25th signified the beginning of Chinese New Year celebrations and to kick start these celebrations, we decorated the entrance to our learning space with beautiful red and yellow lanterns for all to see. This got our tamariki excited and soon enough questions arose about why the lanterns were up and what special occasion was happening.
During our mat time gatherings, our Tamariki enjoyed listening to the story 'Bringing in the New Year' and discussions were held to explore different images and aspects of the Lunar New Year celebrations such as the giving of cards and money, lanterns, dragon dances, sweeping out the old year and the hanging of spring poems and firework displays. As we talked about the firework displays, meaningful connections were made to the fireworks displays during Diwali celebrations.
We decided to create a display to showcase some special pictures and symbols we see during this time and one of our talented little ones took the lead in writing the title.
As a valued and meaningful way of respectfully acknowledging the diversity of cultures within our Buckle My Shoes learning community, well wishes for the Lunar New Year were also displayed above our sign in Korean, Filipino, Mandarin and Cantonese languages for all to observe.
We also explored how to greet and acknowledge a person by saying hello in each of these cultures; “Ni hao”, “Yeoboseyo”, and “Kamusta”. During one of our mat time gatherings our older tamariki, also enjoyed playing a game called “Chinese New Year bingo”, which involved matching the different cultural symbols we had seen and read about in our book to the ones upon the bingo board.
Our little ones of all ages also enjoyed participating in an art and craft activity to create their very own Chinese lanterns to display.
Some of our tamariki were a bit uncertain about how to create the lanterns but through exploration, curiosity, role-modeling, asking for help and trying things out on their own, they discovered that these are important and valued ways of learning and ended up creating their very own lanterns to add to the decorations.
At Buckle My Shoe, we are lucky enough to have a wonderful student teacher who has a Chinese heritage, so we utilised her expertise and knowledge in this area to add more depth to our celebrations. She very kindly translated each of the tamariki's names from English to Chinese, so that we could add these to our New Year display. We discovered that each syllable within our names is represented by one Chinese character. Each character is a wonderful piece of artwork within itself.
This display stimulated a lot of interest from our tamariki as they often visited the list to find and view their own name as well as that of their peers. Our little ones had such a wonderful time exploring music, stories, symbols and traditions that are an important part of Chinese New Year. By acknowledging and celebrating different cultural events, we are teaching our little ones to respect, acknowledge and celebrate diversity and the wonderful rituals that each culture has around the world. 😊