Mandarin – Spring Festival

Celebrating the Spring Festival

Recently you’ve probably seen a lot of red colour and heard words like Gong Xi Fa Cai (Have a prosperous year) and Xin Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year) or in Cantonese are: Gong Hei Fat Choy and Xin Nian Fat Loh. Australia, being a multicultural society, is quite happy to celebrate the Spring Festival (also known as Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year) with Chinese food from local Chinese restaurants or watch a noisy Lion Dance Parade in a local shopping centre. Our students at Lindfield celebrated this festival in a unique way.

For our Kindergarten boys, they designed their own red envelopes. The red envelope/packet is given by the adults to children during the Spring Festival. Inside the envelope, it contains money wishing for another safe and lucky year. The Kindy boys decorated their envelops with traditional lucky symbols such as persimmons, pineapples, oranges, fish, flowers and more. Instead of money, we put our sincere wishes into the envelopes before the boys gave them out to their loved ones.

Stage 1 and Stage 2 boys put their paper cutting skills into practice! Stage 1 cut out the Wealthy god pattern while Stage 2 cut out fish. Why fish during the Spring Festival? The word: Fish sounds like yú in Mandarin meaning abundant and it is a play on words that is used a lot during the Spring Festival. Boys from Stage 2 went deeper – they were asked to compare and contrast the Spring Festival with another festival that we celebrate in Australia. Christmas is the most popular one that was mentioned a lot during our discussions.

Stage 3 boys took part in a joint project of Art and Chinese to create a poster to demonstrate their understanding of the Chinese Zodiac using traditional Chinese characters. Their work will be sent off to enter a poster competition. Furthermore, Stage 3 boys have learnt how Australia connects to the rest of the world by completing the Spring Festival Project. The boys applied their observation, higher level critical thinking and deep understanding skills to justify the conclusion they reached.

All students received a red envelope with money in it – a lucky coin. Sincerely wishing all the boys and their family a very happy year of dog!