CHS to host Chinese New Year celebration
By Mary Ann PriceThe students of the introductory Mandarin class at Canton High School plan to celebrate Chinese New Year 2014 with a celebration at CHS on Wednesday, January 29, from 6-8 p.m. Everyone in town is invited. The Year of the Horse begins on January 31 this year.
The flyer for the upcoming Chinese New Year celebration (click to enlarge)
Mandarin teacher Guoying Yan said that the 21 students in her beginning class have been working hard on the celebration.
“Our class prepared three weeks for this,” she said. “They researched the people, the history, and the food of China.” Yan is from southwest China and has taught Mandarin in the United States since 2006. This is her first year at Canton High School.
Her students will use display boards and the Chromebooks recently purchased through district funds and a Canton Alliance for Public Education (CAPE) grant to do presentations about the culture of China at stations set up in the school’s cafeteria. Visitors can play Chinese games, enjoy food, and do calligraphy and paper cutting. The students will also perform a song in Mandarin.
Heidi Olson, CHS World Languages Department coordinator, encouraged Yan to develop the celebration. Olson had organized a multicultural celebration at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, where she taught before coming to Canton in 2013.
“This is a great way to promote the program,” she said. “We’re trying to build the program. Our goal is also to bring it down to the middle school.”
Olson added that Whitman-Hanson had an exchange program with teachers from China who would spend a year in the district teaching Mandarin at an elementary school or the middle or high school, depending on their background. The yearly change made it difficult for the students to sustain the momentum required to learn a new language.
“We have a teacher in-house,” Olson said. “It’s so wonderful that Guoying is here with us to develop a program.”
Olson said that Yan’s students began to speak Mandarin early in their study of the language, and they also learned to use Pinyin, which teaches the phonetic pronunciation of Chinese characters. In order to teach them the words of the song they will sing next week, Yan used a YouTube video, which had a bouncing ball method of moving through the characters.
“She started in a very rigorous way to work with characters,” Olson said. “It’s very impressive.”
CHS Principal Derek Folan has spent time visiting the Mandarin class and described it as a huge success.
“The students have learned a lot about Chinese language and culture,” he said. “Students have enjoyed it. China is a global icon and developing a global perspective is key to us.”
This is the 36th year that CHS has hosted an exchange with a school with Germany. The school also has travel opportunities for students who study Spanish. Olson wants to pursue travel possibilities for students of French and Mandarin. “One of the things we want to do is expand those opportunities,” she said.
In the meantime, Yan is planning a field trip in the spring to Chinatown to allow students to order in Mandarin at a restaurant and to interact with Mandarin speakers.
Yan’s students designed a flyer for their January 29 celebration of Chinese New Year, which Yan said is also known as the Spring Festival and is celebrated in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Mongolia.
“The credit for the showcase needs to go to Ms. Yan and Ms. Olson,” Folan said. “It’s great to see our students and their work celebrated. It should be an enjoyable evening for anyone who attends.”
Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=23877
Posted by Mary Ann Price
on Jan 23 2014. Filed under Uncategorized.
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