St Mary's Calne
The Dragon Boat Festival (duan-wu jie, 端午节) is an important traditional festival celebrated in China and other Chinese-speaking countries for over 2000 years. It is inscribed on the representative list of the intangible culture heritage of humanity by UNSECO in 2009.
Over the past few weeks, Mandarin pupils learnt the origin of the festival (the legend of Qu-yuan) and ways of celebration including the dragon boat race, feasting on rice dumplings (zong-zi) and other delicious food.
LIV made informative posters as well as paper zong-zi which are displayed in ML2 classroom. These are part of a Dragon Boat Festival poster competition term open to the LIV & LV Mandarin students. Congratulations to the winners in LIV: Georgia, Ami, Emy, Georgia and Jemima, and, in LV, Mona. Thank you for sharing your cultural and vocabulary knowledge with us.
MIV tried ‘standing the eggs’ at noon on Dragon Boat Festival Day and managed to create an impressive egg circle! UIV made Tang-hu-lu as part of cultural lesson. All had fun making the biang-biang noodles (slapping noodles) to celebrate their progress in learning Mandarin Chinese language.
In LV Mandarin, girls completed four most important Chinese festival lessons and learning. They presented the traditional activities in the class and organised the related words on a poster. To celebrate the end of a great term, we had a cooking session to celebrate and to welcome the summer holidays. We made 'Ants climbing the tree', a classic Sichuan dish which was delicious!
Mrs Christina Mitchell and Miss Yi-Ling Kuo
Mandarin, MFL Department