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Celebrating chinese festivals
Affirming the identities, language, and culture of all our children is crucial for us educators at Dilworth Ave. This involves sharing stories from different cultures, learning basic words in different languages, and exploring music and art from around the world. Throughout the year there are many opportunities for us to celebrate different multicultural days at Dilworth Ave.
For example, Chinese New Year, Holi, Diwali, and many more. We believe in understanding families’ backgrounds, connecting families’ cultural heritages to our centre/Dilworth Ave, and creating more equitable opportunities for both children and families. For us celebrating culture is not just about acknowledging differences but also about deep engagement with diverse cultures and worldviews to transform practice. Children bring their own set of culturally based expectations, skills, talents, abilities, and values with them into early education centres.
They begin to develop their self-concept from how others see them. To form positive self-concepts, children must honor and respect their own families and cultures and have others honor and respect these key facets of their identities too. If an education centre doesn’t reflect and validate their families and cultures, children may feel invisible, unimportant, incompetent, and ashamed of who they are. Our teachers believe that authentic, caring relationships with children and families; build connections between what children already know and what they need to know.
Teachers plan and select activities, materials, and instructional strategies that honor children’s cultures and life experiences; and teach children the skills they need to succeed in a global society. This year we celebrated the Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, which are traditional festivals celebrated in Chinese culture. We celebrated the festivals through various activities, such as painting, origami, cooking, dancing, and singing. One of the art activities involved creating a picture of the moon. Teachers offered a variety of materials to inspire children's creativity in crafting their moon-themed artworks.
Children used cotton to depict fluffy clouds, cut out a round yellow circle to represent the moon, and used their fingers as brushes to paint an adorable rabbit! Other activities involved making lanterns, a drum, cooking dumplings, dragon/ribbon dance, calligraphy, and painting.