春节
Chūnjié — Chinese New Year
The biggest festival in the Chinese calendar, and the perfect place to end Grade 1 — it pulls together the year’s numbers, family words, colours and zodiac animals into one celebration students can actually take part in.
Unit objectives
- Say 新年快乐 — “Happy New Year”
- Name four New Year traditions and what they mean
- Recognise 福 and explain why it’s hung upside down
- Use vocabulary from all nine previous units in the year review
Key vocabulary
新年 年 红包 福 龙 舞狮 点心 快乐
A festival, then a look back
Red envelopes & reunion dinner
What actually happens over the fifteen days — the cleaning, the dinner, the envelopes, the fireworks.
Which animal is this year?
The zodiac returns from Kindergarten, now with the characters for the years and a craft to make.
Year review game
All 40 characters, every sentence frame, one board game. The year’s work, played rather than tested.
Why 福 hangs upside down
Families paste the character 福 — good fortune — on their front doors at New Year, and very often they hang it upside down on purpose. The reason is a pun: “upside down” is 倒 dào, which sounds exactly like 到 dào, “to arrive.” An upside-down 福 therefore says “fortune has arrived.” Chinese culture is full of this kind of sound-play, and it’s the same instinct behind lucky eight and unlucky four from Kindergarten.
End-of-year check
Not a test — a snapshot. Can your child:
- Read most of the year’s 40 characters?
- Write 一 to 十, plus 我 你 好 大 小?
- Say their name, age and one thing they like?
- Ask someone else a question and wait for the answer?
Grade 2 assumes reading of about 40 characters. If that’s shaky, replay this unit’s review game over the summer rather than pushing ahead.