Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Today at Petite School, we celebrated the Lunar New Year, specifically Chinese New Year. This excited me to no end.

I've been doing Chinese New Year lessons since my very first year of teaching; I have a small collection of items and books that have gone all over with me. In Stockton, I not only taught about the music, I did art projects like paper lanterns, red envelopes, and other fun stuff.

Imagine my delight when I was offered the job at Petite School and found out that every year, the primary grade teachers to a huge celebration. I immediately offered to help out, and as today the younger classes would not be coming to music class, with the celebration happening during their normal music times, I asked if I could run a center. My colleagues said, "Of course!!"

One center taught the kids about the Chinese Zodiac, while the other centers had art projects. The students learned how to write the Mandarin characters for "snake" (after all, 2013 is the year of the snake), made Popsicle stick fans, and painted pictures of colorful dragons. In my center, they learned about the dragon dance.

I read a great little book I've been toting around for years about the dragon dancers in the Chinese New Year parades, and then, we did our own dragon dance using two dragon puppets. The kids giggled as we danced around the room to Chinese drums.

I showed them a beautiful fan that was gifted to me by one of my exchange students over the summer, and told them how special this gift was to me. We listened to other Chinese music and looked at pictures of traditional Chinese instruments. I saw each small group (ten kids) for twenty minutes each, so the time flew by. At the end, we had a huge feast that the parents had brought--pot stickers, egg rolls, beef and chicken dishes, rice. It was delicious.

After all these years of being the only teacher covering the lunar new year in my lessons, it was so much fun to be part of something larger, where we all devoted time and energy to it. Parents milled around, helping teachers, taking pictures, setting up food. The kids had a lot of fun, and had some great artwork to show for it at the end of the day.

I had my new camera with me--a recent gift to myself--and took a few pictures when I had the chance. I don't post pictures of my students online, but you can see some of the art they made. These students are all kinder, first and second grade students...so the work is quite impressive.

A paper lantern hanging in a lemon tree.

One of the kinder classes made this dragon.

The teacher in charge of planning has a TON of
great clothing and other stuff from Asia.

In one of the kinder classrooms.

Dragon paintings

Kid-made lanterns.

Mandarin calligraphy

But one teeny-tiny part of our huge feast.

After all of this, I had about three minutes of my normal lunch time to set up for my afternoon musical rehearsal, which was two hours of running around, singing, pounding notes on the piano, reading lines, calming hyper fifth graders down, and general fun. It flies by. A particularly dreadful case of Rush Hour, then I arrived home, exhausted but quite content.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! May the year of the snake bring you prosperity and good fortune!