Chinese New Year at RSM

The children in Lower School have really enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year this week.

Mrs L came in to talk to the Year 1 children about how the Chinese celebrate Chinese New Year. The children were wowed by the pictures and all the interesting things that Mrs L told them about.  Some of these facts included:

•  That the Chinese people wear red because it is a lucky colour and scares away the devils.
• They do lots of dancing to celebrate and have amazing firework displays.
• The children are given red pockets and inside they used to get 10 pounds when Mrs L was a little girl but nowadays they get up to 100 pounds!
• There are also lots of different coloured balloons filled with money.
• In the evening they have a huge banquets and includes foods such as dumplings.  Mrs L said that people eat far too much on this occasion

The children made some lovely comments afterwards:

• I enjoyed watching the clip on how Chinese New Year is celebrated and I really liked the photos especially the food pictures.
• I learnt the story about the terrible monster, that came every new year and the colour red protects everyone from the monster as he doesn’t like red.
• I liked learning about the song that is sung at Chinese New Year.
• I liked the dumplings, they looked yummy!

A huge thank you to Mrs L for coming to speak to the children and preparing great pictures that made it even more real.!

Kindergarten were also lucky to have a special visitor on Tuesday.  Mrs Churchley and Mrs Ward kindly spared their time to come in and teach them about various Chinese traditions. They learnt that people give presents and envelopes of money to their family and friends, eat lots of Chinese food and celebrate by dancing, decorating their homes with lanterns and letting off fireworks. This year is the year of the pig and on top of everything else, they also learnt how to say ‘Happy New Year’ in Chinese! Throughout the rest of the morning they engaged in plenty of other themed activities as well as tasting prawn crackers and dim sum that their visitors brought in especially.

Thank you to Mrs Churchley and Mrs Ward for their visit; it was thoroughly enjoyed and really enriched the children’s learning.

The Reception children have been celebrating the festival by learning about some of the traditions and making decorations for the classroom.