It's hard to believe that Chinese New Year was the week before last. Time has really flown with the launching of the new term here, beginning February 2nd. My head is just coming up above water, and tonight I got a chance to read the weekly report from the preschool about their celebrations on New Year. They really did New Year's up well! All the activities sound really fun:
Dear Butterfly Parents,
Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Year of the Ox! Rebecca helped set the festive tone of the week by wearing one of her special Chinese outfits on Monday. Several Butterflies compared the fabric in her outfit to the two Chinese dresses in our home center, leading to an impromptu discussion about the creation of silk. Rebecca’s family also gave us lots of Chinese New Year room decorations. Thank you!
We started our New Year’s celebrations by singing the “Ni Hao” song. 
Throughout the week, we explored some of the elements that make Chinese New Year distinctive. We also looked at elements that Chinese New Year shares with other celebrations we know. We discovered that all share special foods, clothes lights, stories, as well as gathering of family and friends.
One of the elements unique to Chinese New Year is that each year is named after an animal. After several guesses as to why, we read a story explaining how the Jade Emperor invited all of the animals to race. The order in which the animals finished determined the order of the years. Many Butterflies spent a long time each day re-enacting the race. Several Butterflies created ox headbands, working with the ideas of symmetry and cutting on lines as we drew and cut out horns.
Throughout the week, we also created mini-dancing dragons. Several Butterflies took turns painting the dragon’s head for our dragon dance on Friday. Most Butterflies colored and painted CD’s to turn into small drums using string, beads, and sticks. This work gave us opportunities to review positional words and the concept of “half”. Other Butterflies worked with drawing and cutting parallel lines to make paper lanterns.
Thursday we took a look at food in Chinese New Year. Many Butterflies were already familiar with dim sum from our books. We added other dishes to that on Thursday and Friday. We started Thursday with an American Chinese New Year cookie mixed barely melted chocolate and chow mein noodles. We talked lots about textures and consistencies as we mixed the sticky cookies together. Later, several Butterflies mixed together rice flour (bringing back memories of when we tried grinding rice earlier in the month for Pongal), oil, and sugar to make a steamed rice cake. We watched the steam rise as the cakes cooked! Then we read a story about a rice cake, cooked similarly to ours, that came to life and ran away.
We wrapped up our abbreviated Chinese New year festivities on Friday. We washed rice and helped put rice in the rice cooker for our snack. Ms. Judith also had cooked noodles at home for us. We had heard that the longer a noodle one eats, the luckier one’s year will be. We all loved the noodles and ate lots of long ones. Thank you, Ms. Judith! But the interesting part was how we ate the noodles and the rice. We had the option of using a spoon, but most of us tried using real chopsticks! The chopsticks were tricky, but our transfer tray practice paid off; we did very well with the chopsticks!
We heard stories about li see, the red lucky money envelope that the dragon brings. So we took our dragons head into the gym, with brightly colored clothes for a body. We each drew dots around the dragon’s eyes, opening his eyes. Then we called to the dragon and twisted our drums. Our dragon woke up! We each took turns dancing with the dragon head and body. Later, others continued dancing with scarves to the Chinese music. But the dragon had done more than dance with us; he had left li see in our mail folders, each with a chocolate coin and a fortune cookie inside.
