How to celebrate Chinese New Year in schools

How to celebrate Chinese New Year in schools

With Chinese New Year around the corner, SBMs need to start thinking and planning how to incorporate celebrations in their school. To make students feel comfortable in your school and feel included, large cultural celebrations like Chinese New Year need to be celebrated across the school.

It can be a challenge to know how to celebrate Chinese New Year in schools, so we have created a list of celebration ideas. Use these ideas as a base to kickstart Chinese New Year in schools and a way to encourage everyone to get involved and learn more about Chinese culture.

Host Chinese New Year themed assemblies

During Chinese New Year SBMs can plan themed assemblies that teach students more about the year of the rabbit. It’s an opportunity to delve into Chinese culture and allow the whole school to embrace it.

Gather information about the year of the rabbit through online research and create a thought-provoking presentation. To engage students in the assemblies, get staff to hand out Chinese hats or lanterns for the assembly. For one of the assemblies, you could even get staff and students involved by acting some of the history out. Using props and their imagination, assemblies don’t have to be presenting. Chinese New Year is the perfect celebration to make school assemblies more fun, no matter who is leading them.

Decorate your school

To entice everyone to participate in celebrating Chinese New Year in schools, consider decorating the school. Having traditional Chinese decorations in areas such as hallways shows students and staff instantly that your school recognises and partakes in other cultural celebrations. This can make children feel accepted for who they are and comfortable. Plus, everyone gets an opportunity to learn about inclusivity and various cultures.

As well as decorations around the school, gather some staff and create Chinese New Year themed displays for the corridors. Doing this can encourage staff to create their own displays for their classrooms and carry these celebrations on during their lessons for students to enjoy.

There are many traditional decorations you can make with staff, but the staple for Chinese New Year is the lantern. Stock up on crepe fold paper to create the pop-up lanterns and some paper chains to hang around the school. 

Learn Chinese New Year vocabulary and zodiacs

It can be difficult to know how to celebrate Chinese New Year in schools if you don’t have a lot of knowledge about it. The best way to encourage your school to get involved is if you are knowledgeable. Learn the vocabulary used during Chinese New Year and each of the zodiacs and why they are important to Chinese culture.

Here’s a short list of Chinese New Year vocabulary which is good to include when talking about celebrations to your school:

• Firecrackers (bianpào)
• Red envelopes (hóngbao)
• Fireworks (yanhua)
• Lantern (denglóng)
• Dragon dance (wu lóng)
• Dumplings (jiaozi)
• New year cake (niángao)
• Longevity noodles (chángshòu miàn)

Here’s a list of all the Chinese zodiacs to be familiar with starting with the year of the rabbit:

• Rabbit
• Dragon
• Snake
• Horse
• Sheep
• Monkey
• Rooster
• Dog
• Pig
• Rat
• Ox
• Tiger

Delve into these zodiacs and share these key phrases and zodiacs with staff so they can be knowledgeable of the process of Chinese New Year.

Take a look at this website for more information about what celebrations occur for Chinese New Year.

Why not invest in our Chinese Mandarin story pack that comes in  both English and Mandarin for the school to use? Perfect for students who speak and understand Mandarin but struggle with English and for all children to see the language and learn certain symbols.

Encourage your school to go deeper into the history

Set a task for the whole school to delve deeper into the history of Chinese New Year. The best way to learn and understand cultures is through the origins of their celebrations, the importance of them and the purpose. This leads to interest from others and encourages everyone to participate. Plus, it gives the message to children to accept our differences and include everyone’s culture.

Find resources for every year group to do and hand them to staff to use in their lessons. Also, research the history and make key notes to highlight to staff that they must cover. Let staff introduce the history in whichever way they want.

Try incorporating traditional Chinese New Year cuisine

If possible, consider incorporating Chinese New Year cuisine into school lunches. Certain foods are at the centre of Chinese culture and celebrations. Try and offer some of these foods at lunch time to kickstart celebrations and allow students to try something new.

Certain foods you could offer are noodles, dumplings,  New Year cake and spring rolls. Offering these helps everyone to embrace Chinese New Year and learn more about how they celebrate it.

Have a wear red day

Red is a very important colour for Chinese New Year celebrations and this needs to be reflected across the school. Red represents good luck or fortune in Chinese culture. This stems from the legend of Nian, the monster that comes every New Year’s Eve. Red paired with fireworks instils fear into the monster and sends it away. Due to this, it is tradition to hang red lanterns in the window and wear red.

Enforce a wear red day for your school and ask students and staff to wear anything red for a day. State the importance of wearing red to staff and reiterate this during the morning assemblies leading up to and on the day. This is a perfect way for students to learn further about the celebration and participate in celebrating the Chinese New Year.

Keep this inclusivity going

Celebrating the Chinese culture doesn’t stop there. Acknowledging and embracing Chinese New Year in schools is vital but after the celebrations are over, make plans for your school to still learn about all different cultures. Activities that teach students about various cultures need to carry on throughout the year. It is an SBMs duty to ensure that staff are always thinking about inclusivity not only for large celebrations.

Set out cultural key dates and find other dates to slot in talks, lesson ideas and assemblies about cultures and share with your staff. These can be used as a guideline to steer your staff towards inclusivity throughout their lessons. Therefore, this doesn’t have to be in detail as it is up to teachers to choose the focus of their lessons. However, this ensures that your school are all learning about the different cultures in the world and embracing all our differences.

Use these ideas on how to celebrate Chinese New Year in schools to encourage students and staff to embrace and learn about Chinese culture. Set guidelines for staff to follow and ensure the whole school partakes, including yourself. Make this celebration fun for everyone so that they want to learn more about the Chinese New Year and fully get involved.

Remember to plan out the rest of the year for other cultural celebrations and general ideas you can share so that all year round your school is as inclusive as possible. This allows all students to feel welcome, comfortable, valued and respected.

Discover more ways to celebrate cultures through our ‘celebrating Diwali’ blog and show us how your school is celebrating Chinese New Year on twitter.