Walk Through Of Our Chinese New Year Speech and Language Therapy Sessions

The Chinese know how to celebrate!

 Their Lunar New Year celebration began January 31, 2014 and will last for the next 15 days! 

Some Facts About Chinese New Year:

1. The celebration is more commonly referred to as the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year in China.

2.  Over 3.6 billion journeys will be made throughout the holiday period.

3.  Lantern festivals, bazaars and horse races will be completed during the 15 day festival.

4. Lunar New Year custom forbids cleaning- it's believed to sweep away good luck.

5. Fu (the Chinese character for luck) can be attached to doors to bring in good fortune for the new year.

6. There will be big fireworks displays. Legend says a monster named Nian is easily scared off by them.

7. The color red is worn and seen everywhere. It is said to ward off bad luck.

8.  A traditional sweet treat will be ate called nian gao which is a type of rice pudding.

9. The Chinese will enjoy watching uplifting holiday comedies with feel good endings. 

10. New shoes, new clothes will be bought and haircuts will traditionally be done after the end of Chinese New Year. 

*ANOTHER FACT*

PEOPLE WORLDWIDE LOVE TO CELEBRATE WITH THE CHINESE 

AND LEARN ALL ABOUT THEIR WONDERFUL HOLIDAY! 

It's truly fun and rewarding to teach our speech students about a holiday that is not one of their own. They especially love to find out which zodiac character their year of birth represents. Some are very happy with their result once we look it up, others not so much. One student demanded that I change his zodiac character to a dog since he was not going to be the pig!! Ha!!!

Most of the activities we did this week came from our own Chinese New Year Unit. It can be found at Teachers Pay Teachers and Teachers Notebook.  Outside the room the students repeated CNY vocabulary, phrases and/or sentences depending on their verbal expression levels. /WH/ questions were asked as well while the student attempted to toss the rings onto the pegs.  The students enjoyed feeding "Henry The Horse" (2014 is the year of the horse!) and/or putting tokens onto the token mat while they completed their speech, language and/or articulation targets.

On the door of the speech room we had activities for following 1, 2, and 3- step commands. The students really enjoyed following the directions while they played "Henry Says" (a take on the game "Simon Says).  The students also completed following directions and preposition requests as they placed animals onto the picture scene i.e. "Put the monkey below the pagoda".  Other students answered listening comprehension questions. It was also fun to follow the receptive and expressive language ideas on the zodiac description cards which are also in our Chinese New Years unit.

In addition, we had a blast completing fun  Chinese New Year crafts while answering and completing speech, language and articulation targets. Tangerines were eaten for good luck! And Chinese sauces were tasted while adjectives were discussed. The students practiced their chopstick skills while they transferred the "rice"- (large cotton balls) from one container to the other.

We used pages in our CNY unit to complete many more activities such as puzzles, game boards, tracing, reading, and coloring tasks. For our articulation students the majority of their sessions were used completing the articulation worksheets from our CNY unit. They especially enjoyed practicing their words as they completed the paint dotter, roll and color and maze pages.

Manda and I would like to wish you a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR and ALL THE LUCK IN THE WORLD!

Sincerely,

Shanda and Manda, SLPs