This is a holiday that Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Malaysian, Filipino and Indonesian cultures celebrate. This week we learned about how new year is celebrated in Chinese culture, while also bringing in books about how other Asian cultures celebrate the new year.
Baos and Dumplings
We began the week by reading Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao by Kat Zhang. This is a story about how Amy overcame her frustrations trying to make the perfect bao, not too big and not too small, and ultimately finds a way to make her own perfect baos.
Amy’s story inspired us to make our own veggie dumplings! Dumplings are known to be symbols of good fortune and prosperity because they resemble Chinese gold and silver ingots as seen below!
Making a Yummy Plate!
In this activity students made a plate of food based off an order sheet that let them know how many of each item to put on their plate. The food includes: fried rice, beef and corn noodles, fried dumplings, steamed dumplings and shumai dumplings.
Zodiac Animals
We learned that this year is the Year of the Snake! We read The Great Race by Christopher Corr where we learned why each year symbolizes a certain animal, and how the order of those animals came to be. Afterwards, we played Zodiac Animal Bingo where we tried to fill our board of all of the 12 zodiac animals! We also put out zodiac animal coloring pages for those who wanted color in these animals and bring them home.
Hong Baos (Red Envelopes)
We ended the week with a hong bao, lucky red envelope, with a symbol of good luck and fortune inside!
It was such a special week celebrating Lunar New Year and I was so happy to share this holiday with the Pizza Donuts! Happy Year of the Snake!
