Happy Chinese New Year

新年快乐 / 新年快

(Xīnnián kuàilè)

Happy New Year Happiness

January  25( Sat) is the Chinese new year!  Buds class also celebrated Chinese New Year today through Chinese foods and New Year art activity.

<Making a Chinese dragon>

Dragon is one of the symbols  for Chinese New Year. They often do dragon dance performance on the street to scare away evil sprits. Today, Erika was at the art table to help in making our own dragon to have a great new year. There were cut– out dragon faces and tails which we coloured with colourful markers. Also, it led us to practice to hold the marker with pencil grasp. After colouring the dragon’s face and tail, we put the body part which made by long rectangle construction paper and two popsicle sticks so that we can hold the popsicle sticks and moved the dragon as if it is dancing.

<Playing with playdough>

Playing with the playdough is always fun to do because it is open-ended and we can express our imagination through the playdough.  Z stayed at the playdough table for a long time with John and she said, “I made a pizza!” and proudly showed it to him. We also busy tapping playdough with spoons and cut the playdough to make snakes.

<Making Dumpling>

Today’s big project was to celebrate Chinese New Years with one of the traditional Chinese foods called jiao-zi (dumpling).

~Ingredients~

Dumpling skins Cabbage Chinese mushroom Soy sauce Tofu

First, we cut Chinese mushroom and cabbage to small pieces with knife. Chiaki called each one of us if they would like to cut those and everyone said, Yes. Before holding and cutting the vegetables, Chiaki explained how to use the knife. 1. We only touch the handle of the knife  2. When we are cutting, make sure we look at the vegetables and not look around the classroom to prevent cutting own fingers.

We fellow the instructions and able to cut the vegetables small as possible and put them into the bowl.

Second, we added Tofu to the bowl and mixed them together with spoon. Third step was the hardest part which was wrap the all the ingredients around the dumpling skins. When we wrapped it, we used the gentle hands and tapped the dumpling skins carefully, otherwise, we could make a hole on it. Lastly, John and Erika fried the dumplings with hot pan.

<Circle Time>

We gathered around the carpet area after cleaning up all the time and made a beautiful circle by holding hands. While we were holding hands, Chiaki asked what kind of body motion we could do. We nodded our head, shook our body and Si and Ra said, “Jump!” so we jumped up high.

Chiaki said, Xīnnián kuàilè and showed the video of Chinese New Year in Hong Kong where they performed lion dance. We were very amazed how they dance, especially, when the lion stepped to the high poles by jump very high. Next, Chiaki brought the animal house and guess who lives in the house by listening to animals sounds and features, such as mew– mew, woof-woof and neigh-neigh. As soon as Chiaki said, snap, Si said, crocodile and Al said, alligator and smiled. After all the animal came out from the house, we counted the all animals as a counting practice. Before having the special snack time, we read the book called The Snowy Day written by Ezra Jack Keats because our weather forecast said it might be snow next week and we cannot wait to play with snow.

During snack time, we ate very delicious dumplings to have Chinese New Year experience and then, we went for a walk see around our neighborhood.

Have a nice day!

Love, Buds Class