Spring Festival, also known as Chinese Lunar New Year, is the most important and grandly celebrated of all the Chinese holidays. Before the festival, people traditionally make many preparations to help create a festive atmosphere, such as cleaning their house thoroughly, creating spring couplets, hanging up Chinese lanterns, holding blessing rituals to pray for a harvest year. At Hiba Academy Shanghai, pupils and teachers prepared three performances to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year.
Spring Festival falls on 25th of January this year, earlier than last year. Thus, my partner Sarah and I began to discuss and plan our performance very early on.According to the objective of our music curriculum — ‘learning in singing’, our bilingual performance grew out of the work we do during our music sessions each week. Ms. Sarah carefully selected English songs for each class that celebrate the new year, Spring Festival traditions, and the coming Year of the Rat.
Many of these songs, such as Five Little Fireworks and Hickory Dickory New Year, combine familiar children’s melodies with new lyrics to create songs suitable for celebrating the season. Considering pupils’ characteristics in different year groups is a rule that we followed when choosing which songs to perform. For example, we chose animal-based songs for each class in EY2. Besides, the melodious lyrics were easy for pupils to remember. They could easily sing the rhythms after only listening to them once.
It is widely acknowledged that music comes from our life experiences and we cannot imagine life without music. For this reason, ‘Riding my Favourite Motorcycle’ performed by EY3 was chosen because of pupils’ fond memories of their favourite music game, ‘traffic lights’.
During last October, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of founding of the People’s Republic of China. During that time, many pupils saw the popular film ‘Me and My Country’, which motivated them to learn the theme song. This is why the classic and catchy theme song of ‘Me and My City’ became the last song to be performed by EY4. By making this decision, we showed our respect to children’s thoughts and opinions while offering a good opportunity for them to express their love for their country.Details play an important role in determining the success or failure of any performance. Hence, we tried to learn from previous show preparation experiences. This time, from purchasing props and costumes to setting the stage and assigning tasks, academic and non-academic teachers worked collaboratively to pay much attention to the finer details, determining the best path ahead through friendly discussion and orderly conduct. It was because of these efforts and the energy offered by pupils and teachers alike that this year’ s Spring Festival performance went through smoothly and successfully.
Let us say goodbye to 2019 and hello to 2020! We wish everyone a happy and prosperous Year of the Rat.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
