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Dragon Dance
When it comes to embracing cultures and diversity, Best Start Lambie is at the forefront of acknowledging the cultures. One such opportunity arrived in February when we were able to look at Chinese culture and learn about it during chinese new year celebration.
Our children created a dragon with teachers with cardboard during which they were painting and learning about shapes. There were many questions asked around what are dragons? Where to they live? This opened new area of creativity and explore the Chinese culture further through books, stories from parents and looking at information from internet. The children were interested to know about dragon stories and wanted to pretend as dragons.
Dragon dance was the concept seen by children in books and they wanted to try this out. Dragon dance symbolises the bringing of good luck and prosperity in the year to come for all the human beings on earth. We spoke about significance of dragon dance in the Chinese New Year and how streets are seen with these performances. Our performer teachers demonstrated how to do the dance before our children had their turn. Our tamariki enjoyed walking around under the sheets as they pretended to be a big dragon. We were playing the loud dragon dance music which was mesmerising seeming that Chinese culture is alive in the centre. We were supported by the parents who walked in for pick-ups during this time showing culture embracement and acknowledging our efforts for teaching our children about multicultural aspects of Aotearoa.