Part of my Senior Ventures project is to share my culture and language with the Darlington Community. I had the opportunity to teach our fifth-grade students about Chinese New Year and Chinese Zodiac. During the class, we discussed how Chinese people celebrate the New Year, and I told them about my family traditions and answered their questions.
I really enjoyed spending time with the students. They were passionate and eager to learn. We read articles together, played Kahoot games, and I provided them with a variety of snacks and treats from China, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan. I also wrote and pronounced each of their names in Chinese, and I left them with tiger coloring sheets because it is the year of the tiger on the Chinese zodiac. The first-place winners of the Kahoot games received a tiger to celebrate this year's animal. The fifth-grade students were very polite and said thank you to me after class. They really did a great job with the entire lesson.
I am excited about the Chinese New Year that will begin on Feb. 1 and lasts for 15 days. What I like most about the New Year is the time to get together with my family. Usually many of my family members are busy with their work and we seldom see each other, but in the New Year, we have the chance to get together and have a good time. At the same time, everyone stops working during the New Year, so we can throw away all our worries and celebrate with our families.
This is my fourth year at Darlington, and I am glad the students from China are able to celebrate the Chinese New Year together. We have a day off of school to watch the New Year shows together and then to eat our favorite foods at a local restaurant. The New Year means to say goodbye to the past and embrace the bright future. I want to thank Ms. Cline and Mrs. Fine for this opportunity to teach their students about an important part of my culture. San Nin Fai Lok (Happy New Year)!
Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.
