Robert Miles Junior School celebrated Chinese New Year early on Tuesday 6th February with many exciting activities taking place. Our school, based in the heart of Bingham just off the Market Place, serves an increasingly diverse catchment with many children in our community coming from Hong Kong. This was a great opportunity to celebrate customs from around the world and bring Chinese traditions into school.
Beautiful decorations adorned the school and staff wore red and gold to mark the start of the festivities. There was a real buzz as children came into the school hall, which was decorated with colourful lanterns, as a special visitor, Mrs Greenway, and her son, had been invited to share a whole school assembly. She talked about customs and traditions held in China such as the lantern festival, cleaning houses to mark the start of a new year, families sharing delicious food, children receiving red packets containing money to wish them good luck for the forthcoming year and of course, there was a traditional dragon dance to Chinese music.
Mrs Greenway delivered exciting workshops to both Year 4 classes where children listened to traditional Chinese tales, acted out the parts and recreated a traditional lion dance both as part of a huge lion and in pairs wearing masks. The children thoroughly enjoyed playing instruments and making lots of noise to scare the ‘beast’ away!
Year 3 created beautiful lanterns that symbolize people letting go of the past year and welcoming the Chinese New Year with good fortune. Year 5 designed wonderful dragon puppets which encompassed the spirit and vitality of the dragon dances whilst Year 6 thoroughly enjoyed creating dragon masks full of colour and shimmer.
To make the day even more special, our wonderful kitchen and midday staff transformed the hall into a Chinese banquet with traditional music playing and stunning red and gold tablecloths on the tables. They served chicken chow mein and sweet chilli quorn and noodle stir fry followed by mandarin orange jelly. There was a real sense of community as staff and children shared their delicious meal together and helped each other use chopsticks – often with the children having more success than the adults!
Special thanks must go to Mrs Tang (Teacher in Year 5 and 6) and Mrs Tsang (Teaching assistant) who put up all the beautiful decorations, brought in traditional dress for staff to wear, organised the day’s activities and gave fortune cookies for the children to take home. It was wonderful to share Chinese culture and traditions together and we look forward to building on these special celebrations in school every year.
2024 is the year of the wood dragon in the Chinese zodiac and dragons are well-known for their intelligence and loyalty. They are capable of incredible things when they set their minds to something – just like the children of Robert Miles Junior School!
If you would like to come and look round our school please email the headteacher, Mr Evelyn on:
[email protected]
Written by Debbie Alcock, Deputy Head Teacher at Robert Miles Junior School