A Week Full of Celebration
We spent much of this past week in celebration! While the children are still actively exploring their collective interest in worms, we took a couple of detours this week to recognize some holidays.
Valentine’s Day
Because many of our families expressed interest in bringing special treats and gifts for the children, we chose to celebrate Valentine’s Day a bit early, choosing the day in our week when all of the children are in attendance together. We began by preparing on Tuesday for a Valentine’s party: we made decorations, prepared bags for sharing gifts, read some Valentine’s stories, and discussed what it was we’d be celebrating. We talked about using our Valentine’s party to celebrate the love we all have for one another and our friendship. We planned to say kind things and create kind gifts for our friends in the interest of celebrating love!
On Wednesday, we hung our paper chains, created Valentines cards and beaded friendship bracelets for one another, and we spent lots of time matching the letters in our names as we worked on distributing gifts to the proper gift bags for each child. In preparation for our party, we made a special treat together: lemonade from the lemons on our lemon tree! We all worked together to measure, count, stir, and take turns as we followed the recipe to make lemonade. At lunch time, we shared our lemonade, ate heart-shaped PB&J with heart-shaped apples, and passed out all of the generous treats donated by our families!
Lunar New Year
On Friday, we spent the day celebrating the Lunar New Year! We began by reading a couple of books in the morning and discussing the meaning of the Lunar New Year, as well as recognizing the fact that there are different cultural celebrations for the holiday originating from different places. We studied up on some ways to celebrate, and the children drew a lot of inspiration from the books we read for what types of celebrations they’d like to add to our lunchtime party.
Next, we worked on painting some lanterns together, and we chose to use the Chinese good-luck color, red! (We continued this theme throughout much of our celebration!) After our lanterns seemed decoration-ready, the children flipped through our books to find inspiration on how to best prepare for a lunchtime celebration of the Lunar New Year. We remembered from one of our books that the characters wore rat masks, and from another book that this year is the year of the Ox on the Chinese zodiac calendar. The children independently put these ideas together and wanted to make ox masks! per their request, I provided them with some masks to decorate. We also took a bit of time to figure out which year each of us were born according to the Chinese zodiac chart in our book!
Next, it was decorating time. Berkeley requested some themed music, so I found a “Lunar New Year” playlist on Spotify as our background music. We danced and decorated until lunch time! We found an ox in our animal basket to create a centerpiece at our lunch table, and Berkeley and Dominic created fireworks from pipe cleaners to arrange around him (inspired by another tradition we learned about in our books). The children then went on a mission to find as many red decorations as possible for good luck! Dominic let his creativity take him even a step further and re-created a fai chun (a Chinese character decoration) to hang upside down at our doorway, just like he saw in our book! Making connections and developing early literacy!
Next up, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: lunch time! We got some special lunch time treats to celebrate the holiday! We chose traditional foods and discussed their relevance to Lunar New Year celebrations:
Dumplings: Dumplings are representative of family and togetherness while celebrating the new year.
Chicken lettuce wraps: Because the Cantonese word for lettuce wrap sounds like “rising fortune,” we eat lettuce wraps for good fortune in the new year.
Spring rolls: Because they look like gold bars, spring rolls also represent good fortune and wealth.
Oranges: Oranges also represent wealth and fortune, due to their similar look to gold coins!
We rounded out our meal with sesame sticks and a fortune cookie before nap! Everyone loved our party food and filled their tummies full! Happy Lunar New Year!
