Chinese New Year Explanation

How is the Chinese New Year celebrated?

Photo by Flying Pharmacist, CC BY-SA 3.0

Chinese New Year is the marking of the start of a new year. This celebration begins on the new moon and ends on the full moon fifteen days later. It is celebrated with special meals, gift giving and visits to family and friends.

During this celebration people prepare traditional foods such as egg rolls, noodles and shrimp. These different traditional dishes also have their own meaning. The egg rolls symbolise wealth for the upcoming year because they look like bars of gold. The noodles represent a healthy and long life, as long as you don’t cut them. The shrimps mean happiness because in Mandarin shrimp has a close meaning to smile.

Throughout Chinese New Year, you will see decorations that contain the colors red and gold. The meaning behind the red is happiness, because it was the color that was used to defeat the monster Nian. They use these colors on a lot of their decorations such as banners, flags and envelopes. These red envelopes (Hong Bao) are given to children and unmarried adults to give them good fortune and luck.

Chinese New Year celebrations end with a lantern festival and parade lead by dancing dragons and lions. This is because Chinese people use traditional dances to recreate and tell stories. In their dances they use different animals and creatures such as dragons and lions. All of the traditional dances have played a part in their history.

The Chinese New Year is the marking of the start of a new year. It brings family and friends across the world together, to celebrate good fortune.

Today my partner Te Pounamu and I wrote an explanation about the Chinese New Year. The reason was to help remind us how to write a proper explanation. To help us we used TIIC. Title, introduction, information and conclusion. We used simple, compound and complex sentences to improve our writing. We made sure to use present tense when writing our explanation. When we finished the writing we used DRAFT. Delete, rearrange, add, fix and talk. We used this to make sure our sentences made sense.

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As part of Reading we read the next article leading to the Treaty of Waitangi. The text we read was about the one week before the treaty of Waitangi was signed. It was an interesting book. While reading we had to note all the words we are unsure of or interested in. After reading the text we were to make a DLO summarizing the whole article. I worked with Fraidoon and Mataio. When we are summarizing a text we use a special method which is to write the 20 most important words, then the 6 most important words and write a short summary. This all links back to the words we were to write down while reading the text. 

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This week for maths, our activity was about solving problems. This weeks problem was about elecives. It was about finding the amount of people in each elective group. There were 6 to find, but we also needed to figure out how many people had left the school to go to an inter school sports competition. So we needed to change the amount of kids who are left at school to get the correct answers. We then needed to make a DLO showing how we got our answers, and showing our answers. This activity could either be done individually, or with a partner or group. This time, I worked with Carl, and it was a really challenging activity, but on the other hand, really fun to work out. It took Carl and I roughly half an hour to get our answer, and once checked, we found that we got all of our answers and working out correct. All of our working out can be found in the DLO, including the problem as well.

Summer Learning Journey 2017/18

Huge congratulations to all our Summer Learning Journey 2017/18 participants! Today Rachel, Mika and Matthew came to PBS to present our blogging champions with their certificates and prizes. Well done to Mele and Alex who were our top blogers, Ofa who came second, Marieta who came third, and Angela and Fau who were both highly commended. 

A huge thank you to Rachel and her team who read and commented on every post. Well done to all our PBS bloggers. You have set yourselves up for a successful year of learning, and we are all very proud of you!

Congratulations Jack!

Congratulations Jack for receiving your Respect CARE award badge! Have a look at Jack's blog  to see the different ways he explored the value of respect. Superb effort Jack!

Congratulations Angela and Viva!

Congratulations Angela and Viva, a certificate for the great start you have made to your 2018 learning journey. Keep working hard girls!

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