Cultural Celebrations promote cultural appreciation, global awareness, inclusivity, heritage preservation and provides form of academic enrichment for children. In order to accomplish this, the preschool classroom discussed Black History Month and the Chinese New Year. We talked about Maya Angelou and we watched a short video about her accomplishments. The educators and the children then discussed what we learned from the video. Sofia said, “She is a dancer.” Gabriella added, “People are mean to her.” Rumi put her hand up and said, “We can be anything we want to be.” All the children and the educators agreed with Rumi. We said that all skin colours are equally beautiful and we surely can be anything we want to be. The life of Maya Angelou helped teach the children courage and to bravely approach situations where they might be nervous or fearful.
We then discussed a famous quote by Maya Angelou, “Be a rainbow in someone’s cloud." Oliver said, “Rainbow means happy and cloud means sad.” So, we talked about how we can all be happy rainbows and make other people feel loved. Anna said, “We can be lots of colours” and Leo added that, “We can be kind to everyone.” The children also painted rainbows with chalk on paper plates.
The day before the Lunar New Year, Sofia came in wearing her beautiful traditional dress. She brought in a book about Chinese New Year to share with her friends and educator’s. Inside the book Sofia showed us a symbol and said, “We need to draw this on red paper and put it in front of the door to scare away monsters.” We loved that idea! We got red paper and yellow pastel colours to make the symbol. Sofia then proudly displayed the symbol on the preschool room door for everyone to see. Later we read the book, “A Chinese New Year”, and the children showed great interest in the story as our class learned about the Lion Dance and how to be brave and fearless. At the end of the story Theodore said, “Yes we all need to be very brave!”
As we celebrated and discussed the Chinese New Year in a simple, enjoyable, and engaging manner, we encouraged cultural awareness and inclusion for our children.
