Xīnnián hǎo (新年好) - Happy Chinese New Year!

A time for celebration! Xīnnián hǎo (新年好) - Happy Chinese New Year! 

The Year of the Tiger

The Chinese New Year, which is also known as the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year is celebrated by millions of people around the world. Houses are decorated with lanterns, red message banners and New Year pictures, there are parades through the streets with music, acrobatics, and dragon dances, Other traditions include having a family reunion dinner on Lunar New Year’s Eve and distributing red envelopes with money to children. The festivities continue for two weeks, finishing with a lantern festival, which signals the end of the New Year celebration period. This year, it is from February 1st to the 15th.   

This week we have had a wonderful time filling the centre with festive decorations, activities and experiences.........

We made lanterns to decorate the classroom

We had a pretend feast, experimented with playdough and paint as we explored different chinese symbols and made red envelopes (hongbao) decorating them with chinese symbols

 (some of our friends were hoping, they too, might receive some money, if they took their red envelopes home)

We painted cherry blossom trees

And made two types of paper fans

We even dressed up as dragons!!!