Celebrating Chinese New Year – The Year of the Rat

The Year of the Rat – Celebrating Chinese New Year

One of our very favorite school events each year is celebrating Chinese New Year with our children and families with a visit from the Kung Fu Academy with their lion dance performance. This year was no different, and we loved watching our children be brave, with all the drums playing and the lion coming to visit each of our classrooms.

Embracing the Montessori philosophy and with it, the cultural diversity of our team, families and children, we enjoy celebrating holidays around the world and learning about the multitude of different traditions and customs.

As always, our families helped by having red envelopes prepared with ‘crisp new dollar bills’ for their children to feed the lion, and we loved having our families join us for the event.

Why do we prepare the red envelopes?

It is because we want our children to learn about the traditions followed by Asian countries. We fill the envelopes with new money, because we wish for the New Year to bring prosperity, luck, good health and good fortune to everyone.

Our children are invited to wear their traditional outfits for this celebration, and even children who generally do not celebrate this holiday in their family, decided to wear the red and/or gold colors for the event. These are the colors worn by Asian children for the New Year, and many of our non-Asian children went right along with this tradition.

Hearing the conversations our children shared with their families that day was truly inspiring. They had so much to say! It was wonderful to see that they all had learned something new about traditions of such importance to Asian families and children.

We love our children’s curiosity, spirit and courage to continually be ready for new experiences and adventures.

From our SpringStone family to yours,

we wish you a successful, happy and prosperous Year of the Rat!