4 Day Chinese New Year Celebration!

  • Students : K-12, Adults/ Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
  • Learning Objectives: Student will be able to
  1. apply festival greetings to show wishes to their families, friends and teachers
  2. write the short message in letter format
  • Assessment:
  1. Students summarize multimedia information, referring to prior knowledge
  2. Students practice speaking newly learned sentences to give wishes to one another
  3. Students write Chinese sentences with right stroke order in an appropriate format
  • Assignment: Students send their cards to people they wrote to and share with teacher how they like the cards
Click to Download the Complete Lesson Plan

Looking for more ideas or resources on teaching Chinese New Year in your classroom? Check back for our daily updates on CNY activities or contact your account managers (Kelly , David and Amy) for assistance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  • Students : K-12, Adults/ Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
  • Learning Objectives: Student will be able to
  1. Discuss various traditions and customs of Chinese New Year
  2. Write “福” with right stroke order
  3. Judge their own and others’ works
  • Assessment:
  1. Students use prior knowledge, brainstorm the traditions of Chinese New Year, express their ideas in Chinese as soon as possible
  2. Students practice writing “福” themselves, while teacher evaluates how well students do in writing the character stroke by stroke
  • Assignment: Students take their works back home and put them up on their own room doors and take a picture for teacher to collect.
Click to Download the Complete Lesson Plan

Looking for more ideas or resources on teaching Chinese New Year in your classroom? Check back for our daily updates on CNY activities or contact your account managers (Kelly , David and Amy) for assistance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you know what "Year" is? Is it a tiny rabbit who loves eating cabbages and carrots? Is it an old lady who loves singing and cooking good food? Or is it a clock that tick-tocks and tells us about time? No. No. No. "Year" is a MONSTER. He lived alone on the top of a very tall mountain. He had no one to talk or to play with. "Year" became angrier in cold winter days, so he decided to scare people who felt lonely just like him. Therefore, on the coldest day of the winter, people would stay together, wear red clothing, eat delicious food, hang red lanterns and set off firecrackers to frighten "Year." And guess what? "Year" never returned... Here is a sample lesson plan for a new year activity 年的故事. Teachers could flexibly make adjustments according to your students needs.   原文绘本 Interested in reading the full story, come check out Story of the Year! 阅读文稿 Click here to download the Chinese text with Pinyin. 听力录音 Click Here to download the MP3. Narrated by: Amy Liu   动画故事, Visit here for character animations about 年
写字纸 Download the worksheet here.
(My First Chinese Reader & Discovering Chinese Lesson 8, What Date Is It Today?)
  绘画纸   空白单词表 

(Words are selected from Discovering Chinese Pro Glossary)

***For Discovering Chinese Pro users: search "年" in Glossary, and this is the list you will get! ***

What do you have in mind for your Mandarin classroom? Leave a comment and share your ideas with us! Looking for more ideas or resources on teaching Chinese New Year in your classroom? Check back for our daily updates on CNY activities or contact your account managers (Kelly , David and Amy) for assistance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Year of Ram is slowly coming down the pike. Do you have Chinese New Year activities all planned out? Here are some ideas I would like to share for teaching Chinese New Year, and I am sure your students will enjoy learning it very much! Remember to check back for daily updates. First, know about Chinese New Year Traditions: start out with a story that gives students an overall view of Chinese New Year celebrations. Students can work in groups or read individually for 5-10 minutes, then come back as a whole class to discuss: 1) What is the story about? 2) What are the main characters in the story? 3) What do people do in the New Year? 4) What are some of the new words/sentences that you don't understand? You can also create exercises (matching/ filling in the blanks/ multiple choices, etc.) for students to work on while reading? Teach new vocabulary or sentence structures that you think are important in the book. You can use direct instruction in this part, or use the Total Physical Response approach for students to physically interact with vocabulary words and improve their pronunciation. Estimating time: 1 hour
Resources for teachers (in Chinese only)
 
Resources for parents (in English and Chinese)
 
The book, Chinese New Year from Chinese Traditional Festivals is a very good book to start with. Like Thanksgiving to America, Chinese New Year is the most important festival for Chinese people. The book Chinese New Year introduces various celebrations and traditions, including some traditions including lighting firecrackers (放鞭炮, fàng biān pào), making dumplings (包饺子, bāo jiǎo zi), gathering family together for reunions (家人团聚, jiā rén tuán jù), conducting a New Year's eve vigil (守岁, shǒu suì), and reading the Story of the Year (年的故事, nián de gùshì) and etc. Read the book with your class and introduce the traditions with your students.   Second, guided practice/independent practice: review the Chinese New Year celebrations with a speaking practice. If you have an advance level class, make it a writing practice for the students. Here is a sample practice session, lesson 40, 中国的节日 from Discovering Chinese Pro, a web-based curriculum that caters to differentiated learning and allows teachers to easily extend the interactive learning experience beyond the classroom. Want to try it out during Chinese New Year? Request a free one week trial account here. You can also contact our account managers (Kelly , David and Amy) for more information. Estimated time: 0.5 hour
Resources for teachers and parents (in English and Chinese)
 
  Encourage students to use the words they just learned and describe what is showing in the picture: The images below depict how Xiaowen's family celebrates Chinese New Year. Introduce the traditions and celebrations you've learned through the class to your classmates. In your composition, identify the following and try to create the ending for the story: 1. Setting – 情境 2. Characters – 人物 3. Plot development – 情节发展 Download free worksheets here: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.   Third, let's learn by doing and have some interactive activities! If you have enough time, bring up a dumpling session in the class! You would need only dough, filling, pot and heater. It's an easy and fun activity to do in school or at home. Teacher preparation time: 1 hour (at home) Activity time: 40 minutes 包饺子 is an important tradition of Chinese New Year, part of it is because the shape of the dumpling is similar to ancient gold or silver ingots (元宝, yuán bǎo), which symbolize wealth. Also the sound of "jiǎo" is close to "jiāo" (交), which contains the meaning of meet and reunion. Make sure students understand the cultural background of 饺子 and start making their own in class. You can get the wrapper at Chinese markets or you can try to make it yourself. In the book, it also mentioned to add in different vegetable juice to color the dough, it will be really fun for the students to eat and learn the color. For the filling, the most basic and popular flavor is napa cabbage mixed with ground pork and green onion. You can also try different flavors for more variety. Now, bring on the wrapper, filling, and a small bowl of water; let's make some dumplings! 1. Spoon 1 tablespoon of the filling onto the center of the dough. *Tips: notice how you can use your hand to shape the dumpling? Place the filling on the notch of your hand. 2. Bring up the sides of the wrapper, use the water as glue, spread half of the circle at the edge of wrapper. Then press and pleat the edges to seal in the filling. Lift each dumpling by the pleated edge, transfer to the baking sheet and press down lightly to flatten. 3. Boil a pot of water and add in the dumplings. Stir the dumplings nicely so they don't stick to the bottom. 4. After all the dumplings float up, add in one cup of cold water, wait until the water boils again and the dumplings will be ready to serve! Looking for more ideas or resources on teaching Chinese New Year in your classroom? Check back for our daily updates on CNY activities or contact your account managers (Kelly , David and Amy) for assistance.

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