Gung Hay Fat Chow=Happy New Year!

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“Gung Hay Fat Chow” from Riley Avenue Elementary School. “Best Wishes and Congratulations. Have a prosperous and good year.”

Second-grade students at Riley Avenue rang in 4708, the Year of the Tiger this week.  Ironically, the celebration, which marks the end of winter and beginning of spring, had to be postponed due to snow days.

 

This special celebration of the Chinese New Year at the Riley Avenue School in Calverton has been held annually for the past 18 years. Students in Marion Dorman’s and Alicia O’Connor’s second grade classes dress up in authentic Chinese costumes and share with their parents and community members what they have learned about Chinese culture. 

The students study China as part of their social studies curriculum and these two teachers have taken that task the extra mile. They have read books, researched online, watched videos, written to their pen pals in Mississippi about their studies, and made posters.

Ms. Dorman, Ms. O’Connor  and art teacher Melissa Haupt worked together to write a MESTRACT mini-grant to help finance this popular Chinese New Year celebration. The mini-grant is entitled “Spotlight on China.” This is an extra unit social studies that these three teachers have built into their study of holidays, which is part of second grade curriculum. Second graders study the holiday based on its history, customs, food, learn to speak and write words in another language, and read both fiction and nonfiction literature as part of their curriculum. The students in these two classes also made posters, lanterns, red envelopes, dragon puppets, and the “Year of the Tiger” frames.

Their stage performance demonstrates the customs and traditions of the Chinese New Year celebration. The students sing traditional Chinese songs and perform a Ribbon Dance to Chinese music. The performance culminates with the March of the Dragons, which featured last year’s Terracotta Warrior sculpture and this year’s addition, the mythical Chinese Phoenix Bird. The Parade was preceded by a distribution of special good luck gifts to the audience and followed by a full course Chinese buffet for the over 200 parents and special guests who attended. 

In November the students attended a performance of the Shangri-La Chinese Acrobats at the Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts. Still to come is a workshop in Martial Arts on March 15th and a day of learning to write in Chinese. Each child will also be a part of a book about China and will create a power point presentation with the facts they have learned in their studies. They will also get an up close and personal view of China when Mrs. Dorman shares with the classes slides and narrative about her summer trip to China. In addition, the second graders will once again travel to the Wang Center at Stony Brook University on April 14th for the “Asian Day Read Aloud” where they will perform their own “Greetings from China!” extravaganza as part of the Stony Brook’s festivities. 

“This is a program that your children will never forget,” Mrs. Dorman said during the program. “Mrs. O’Connor, Mrs. Haupt and I would like to thank the Mid East Suffolk Teacher Center for their generous support of this program.”