Lunar New Year Represents Culture Appreciation
The World Language Department hosted a Lunar New Year cultural gallery on February 3 in the auditorium for students at Francis Lewis High School. The gallery served as a celebration of the Chinese New Year as well as an opportunity for students to learn the various culture traditions.
“We have four sections, each section represents a different culture,” Chinese teacher Ms. Lin said. “We try to do it in a clockwise direction so that every student has enough time and opportunity to visit each section and each station. Some stations have hands-on activity and other stations just more gallery walks, looking at the poster, learning some language.”
This event is celebrated in Taiwan, Mongolia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and many other Southeast Asian nations, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The celebration is known as “Tet” in Vietnam, “Seollal” in South Korea, and “Imlek” in Indonesia.
“We want students who have language classes to attend the event,” Ms. Lin said, “so that they can learn different aspects of Lunar New Year, not just Chinese New Year but Korean Lunar New Year. Just culture interchange, then they can learn different aspects, practices, products, the culture, food, activities, everything together.”
There were many students who participated in this event by making posters and working on different activities.
“The classes all completed either projects,” AP Language Coordinator Ms. Irving said, “which will be viewed by the rest of the students population or interactive activities that were planned by students with teachers’ facilitation. It’s a lot about recognition and celebration of each other’s cultures.”
Managing the event and “large number of students” was difficult, according to Ms. Irving.
“Originally we planned to use the first floor of the Annex,” Ms. Irving added. “Then we ran into some difficulties with movement of students because of the large number of students that would attend, so then we decided to move it to the auditorium where it would be less difficult to navigate physically.”
The spacing problem caused by the chairs in the auditorium made the auditorium more crowded.“The space in the auditorium as you can understand,” Ms. Irving said, “Having all the chairs running down the center that’s very difficult to walk around pretty much operating on the outline that’s why we try to use the Annex classroom and have students go in and out the classroom.”
People dressed in traditional attire for the Lunar New Year such as “Hanbok”, and also played games with their family and friends.
“I think the games were really fun,” junior Tiffany Lin said. “Seeing people draw was cool. There are like Japanese and Korean, you can see their cultural dresses and their games that are kinda fun.”
Most students appreciate the Lunar New Year event as a learning experience to each other’s cultural backgrounds.
“They enjoyed it,” Ms. Lin said. “Most kids love it. Some of them were asking if we could have authentic food. It’s hard to do it because of the large population that we have.”
