Lunar New Year

My new calendar this year has all kinds of holidays in it, including Waitangi Day, Mothering Sunday, and Chinese New Year.  With the great push for more diverse books, I thought that Chinese New Year was a holiday theme that I wanted to try out this year.  I do have mixed feelings about it – having taken several classes dealing with diversity and multiculturalism, I realize that it isn’t fair or accurately representative to only talk about multicultural holidays: “The Heroes and Holidays approach trivializes the overall experiences, contributions, struggles, and voices of non-dominant groups, consistent with a Eurocentric, male-centric curriculum” from EdChange.org.  But at the same time, in storytime, we have to start somewhere.  I have been adding books both to our collection and to my storytime repetoire that feature multicultural characters and multicultural experiences.

I did do some research on the topic so I could educate parents and give some background on the stories.  I found out through my research that many Asian countries celebrate their new year at this time so it is more appropriately called the Lunar New Year, rather than the Chinese New Year.  2015 is the year of the sheep.

BOOKS: 

We read Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin and A New Year’s Reunion by Yu Li-Qiong and Zhu Cheng-Liang.

Both books were a little long for my mostly toddler storytime, but they dealt with many of the same aspects of the Lunar New Year without being repetitive or being the same story.  It was a good reinforcer.  I personally like A New Year’s Reunion a little more because I love the painted illustrations and the story of a young girl enjoying her dad’s brief visit.  Bringing in the New Year is bright and colorful and informative.

FINGERPLAY:

We learned how to say hello in Mandarin for our fingerplay.

Let’s wave and say “Ni hao (nee how),”
Let’s wave and say “Ni hao.”
Let’s say “hello” to all our friends,
Let’s wave and say “ni hao.”

From Talk Story, a joint project of the American Indian Library Association and the Asian/Pacific Librarians Association.

SONG:

I absolutely love Nancy Stewart’s music.  Clapping in the Castle is instantly stuck in my head whenever I think about it.  She has a version of Gung Hay Fat Choy that we listened to and did the accompanying actions.

CRAFT:

We made dragon masks to bring luck into the new year.  The craft was very easy, but time consuming to prep.  I maybe would do the masks again, but make the mask one piece or just have fewer pieces.