The Chinese Lantern Festival was celebrated on Saturday, Feb 8, 2020.
This is the topic that we were learning about for the week leading up to it in our World-Changing Kids Learning Community.
For this topic, we shared a Conversation Starter that you can use to talk to your kids about this special day. We then shared videos you can watch together to learn more and crafts you can do to honour the day.
This photo shows one of the crafts we completed. We coloured in this Chinese lantern picture to give to one of our friends at school who celebrates the Chinese Lantern Festival. We wrote “Happy Chinese Lantern Festival” in English and in Chinese (after confirming the translation with our friend’s mom).
By teaching our kids about all the different people in our community and their beautiful traditions, customs and culture, we will help build a world where inclusion and friendship is the norm, we will help build peace, and we will teach our children that we all belong to one big human family.
I thought that this was an extra important topic to discuss with the kids, and action to take, to counter the racism and hate that Chinese people have been experiencing as a result of the Coronavirus. While we were colouring our pictures, I took the opportunity to talk about this – to talk about how it is not OK to direct any hatred or even jokes about the Coronavirus to any of our Chinese friends and neighbours. And if the kids heard any of this at school, I suggested they could speak up and say it is not right or tell a trusted teacher or adult that it is happening.
This is how we can help our kids become Upstanders who will make the world a better place – by having one conversation at a time.
This is exactly what we do in our World-Changing Kids Learning Community. For more information on this and to join now as one of the founding members, check out our website:
https://worldchangingkids.ca/archives/6008
And click here if you want to print out the colouring page in case you want to make one too!