Today was an exciting day because we learned a little about China and how they celebrate the new year.
Gong Hei Fat Choy
This is the traditional greeting for Chinese New Year. Literally translated "Gong Hei" means congratulations and "Fat Choy" means to have prosperity. We learned this greeting and the response that Chinese children give to family and friends, "Hong bao na lai." or 'May I have the red envelope, please.' The students learned to say it in English rather than Chinese. We practiced by me greeting them in Chinese and they would respond in English. At the end of the day they got their red envelope.
We learned that the Chinese zodiac is different than ours. In China, the zodiac is based on the year that you are born. This year, 2014, is the year of the horse. We talked about how my yet unborn granddaughter would be a 'horse'. I found little booklets at http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/chinese-new-year for each of the zodiac animals. I printed a booklet for each of the students and one for my year so that we could look at them and learn about some of our strengths. We also looked this year's horse booklet and talked about the strengths of the horse. The students were not surprised to learn that their teacher was born in the year of the monkey. It made sense to them, because they tell me regularly that I am very funny.
Since my students were born in 2009, they were born in the year of the ox. I had made up books for the year of the ox and we learned how to write the character since it only 4 strokes. They thought writing in Chinese was so cool.
We posted Chinese numbers on our number line and learned to count in Cantonese from 1 to 10.
After learning to count to 10 in Chinese, we needed to prepare the supplies for one of our crafts.
We had some 4" square tissue papers to wad up for our Cherry Blossom trees, and
rather than just wadding up the paper (so boring) we listened to Chinese music and danced around the room while we wadded the tissue paper.
We watched a short Dragon Dance on you tube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WUnWPpRslM. We listened to the music and noticed that they mostly used drums and "clangers" (symbols) to make the music. Watching a dragon dance on video was fun but making our own dragon dance sounded like fun.
So we colored a dragon head and tail to make our own dragon. The hard part was trying to decide if we should cut out the dragon fire along with the head or not. In the end the fire was cut off so no one would get burned.
We needed a flexible body, we had a 3" x 18" piece of paper to use for the body. It was rather stiff so we brain stormed and came up with the idea to fan (according) fold it to make it more movable.
Fan folding was a little more difficult than we had thought and the paper was not folded perfectly, but it worked beautifully.
We glued the body to the head and tail and also glued tongue depressors to the head and tail also.
While the dragons dried we took time to make some fortune cookies from cupcake liners. Idea came from http://spoonful.com/crafts/paper-fortune-cookies. As you can see our fortune cookies weren't quite as beautiful.
All that crafting, we had worked up a big appetite, we were hungry enough to eat a horse.So made horses and ate them for snacks.
We created our horses from Town House crackers, banana slices, peanut butter, and cut jelly beans for the eyes and nostrils. Idea came from http://www.pinterest.com/pin/76139049924318683/ Horses by them selves would have been kind of dry so we added yogurt and apple juice to our snack.
During snack I read two books "My First Chinese New Year" by Karen Katz and "Happy New Year!: Kung-hsi ta-ts'ai" by Demi. We learned about some of the traditions that go with Chinese New Year.
After snack we watched the Dragon dance video again and danced with our dragons. Fifty-eight seconds was not enough time for our dragon dance; so, we found a dragon dance that was just over 8 minutes and we danced our dragons till the teacher just about dropped. I was so involved in dancing with my dragon that I forgot to take pictures. We also took out the symbols and Chinese drum and played along with the music. We practiced listening to and following the rhythm.
To rest we made our last two craft projects. We used our wadded up tissue paper balls to make a Cherry Blossom Tree (instructions found at http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/blossom-tree-collage). We made a wiggly glue line across our paper and glued a piece of brown string to it for the trunk and branches of our tree. It was a tricky bit of fun to get the yarn to stick to the paper and not to our fingers. Next we placed dots of glue near our branches and placed the tissue paper balls on the glue for a very cute Cherry Blossom Tree.
We needed to get some fine motor skills in so we cut paper and made Chinese lanterns. We had learned that the New Year Parade could last into the evening and that children carried lanterns in stead of flashlights. Just before going home with their fortune cookies for their families, their dragons, and their Cherry Blossom pictures; I said "Gong Hei Fat Choy" to each one and if they asked for their red envelope, I gave them a red envelope with a piece of Werther's gold wrapped candy (I would have rather given them a chocolate coin but I couldn't find them). They were so excited to finally get their envelope and surprise. All in all it was a really fun day.
Homework was a science project making firecrackers in a jar (https://www.giftofcuriosity.com/easy-to-make-fireworks-in-a-jar/), a math project doing a survey of people to see if they thought the groundhog would see his shadow (2teachingmommies2012.com), and a book buddy bag.
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