New Semester Starts | Dear All, Welcome Back!

A new chapter of the year of 2023 has begun! House of Knowledge is very excited to open our doors as scheduled for the new semester and we are thrilled to see that the campus is full of our children’s happy faces and their laughter again.

Celebrating Chinese New Year traditions, hugging and greeting each other while catching up with old friends and making new friends, and participating in a variety of fun learning activities……today, we would like to take you to review some campus highlights and wishing all of you a very wonderful start for the year of 2023.

In Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, the environment is the third teacher for children. Therefore at House of Knowledge, as being the very first practitioner of Reggio Emilia inspired education, we put great emphasis on creating a well-designed classroom environment which can stimulate children’s curiosity to discover, to explore, to try, and to experience.

Children aged 18 months-6 years old are going through a culturally sensitive period in addition to some other sensitive periods such as sensory sensitivity, social sensitivity, spatial sensitivity, numerical sensitivity, and language sensitivity. In daily life, we can easily find that a child naturally is fond of many kinds of festivals and celebrations, and the reason is because a child’s interest and understanding of culture is the part that he/she needs to develop naturally.

Hence, at House of Knowledge, all our New Year’s exploratory learning and celebrations are well-designed to help children develop their cultural awareness needs, based upon the Reggio Emilia inspired concept.

The New Year’s Ritual

As children are growing up, it is very important for them to understand culture, which is rich and all-encompassing, covering humanities, geography, history, traditions, folklore, zoology, and so on.

When it comes to the month of January, the most exciting thing is to celebrate one of the most important festivals in China – the Chinese New Year!

During the pre- and post- period of the New Year, our children carried out many interesting, unique, and creative celebration activities and projects-based learning.

Wrapping dumplings, making rabbit-themed cookies, lanterns and paper cuts, using ink to make rabbit prints, reading theme-related stories, writing calligraphy, and wearing festive traditional costumes for the New Year…… At House of Knowledge, our children had so many opportunities to learn various social etiquette for the New Year through New Year’s activities.

The children also enjoyed learning many traditions such as what people do for the New Year, how to send New Year’s greetings and blessings to everyone, and how to greet elders during this tradition.

This is a great opportunity for children to understand how people make emotional connections with each other in a traditional custom and atmosphere. In the meanwhile, we also take this opportunity to lead our children to know how they can express their love to their family, friends and teachers, which helps them to develop rich language and emotional expression.

By saying “Happy New Year”, the children can also receive feedback and expressions of love from each other after positive expressions. This enables the children to know that love is a two-way street and can flow, which could help shape the children’s personalities to be more kind and positive.

Sidenote

Check out below some of the creative artworks our children have accomplished in the Chinese New Year class celebration activities! We are so proud of all our children for their inspirations, imagination and creativity.

Summary

What a great start of the semester and for the new year beginning!

In the year of 2023, House of Knowledge will continue to work hard together to create a most caring, reliable, and child-centered learning environment for all our children to learn, to grow, to experiment, and to experience all different things around them in exploring and learning about this fascinating world around them.

We wish everyone a good start for the year of the Rabbit and we look forward to an amazing and very successful spring semester ahead!