Chinese New Year began on January 28th and continued for 15 days. We love celebrating this holiday because it is full of so much symbolism, happiness and good luck! The children began the holiday by sweeping up the classroom to get rid of the old and welcome the new! The children also learned about the traditional Lion Dance and took turns being the lion. In a traditional lion dance, you will hear a lot of loud drums, gongs and cymbals during the lion dance because the loud music scares away bad luck. The lion costume is very intricate with lots of colors and a big head because just like the music, the lion is scaring away bad luck. To continue our studies, the children practiced their scissor skills and made lanterns to decorate the classroom to prepare for the lantern festival.
We also love to cook whenever we can, the teachers whipped up a batch of noodles for the children to eat with chopsticks! The children enjoyed the challenge of using chopsticks to eat! We also talked about the Chinese Zodiac and the year of the Rooster. Many of the children in our classroom were born during the year of the rabbit (2011), dragon (2012), snake (2013) and horse (2014).
To continue the new year celebrations, our artist of the month was Qi Baishi (Last name = Qi, pronounced "Chi"), and we called him Mr. Chi for short! Mr. Chi had a very traditional painting style using a simple brush and ink. He was know for his whimsical and playful style also using watercolors. The children were introduced to his painting, "Fleurs de Prunier" (year unknown) and recreated his work using a "blow painting" technique using ink, a pipette and a straw. The children first used the pipette to drip paint onto their paper (we used Chinese newsprint as our paper!), then a straw was used to blow the paint to create the cherry blossom branches. After the branches were created, the children used either a Q-tip or their pinky finger to make small cherry blossom flowers. The results were nothing short of beautiful!
