Lunar New Year in Taiwan

Because research into elementary schooling has shown that Taiwanese students do not have much insight into their surroundings and their knowledge of Taiwanese traditions is limited, I designed a curriculum about the Lunar New Year Festival. The curriculum focused especially on oral expression and art making. This article describes the journey of making some Lunar New Year posters. The curriculum was implemented with 35 fourth grade students in an elementary school in Tainan over a period of four weeks from December to January 2007, right before the Lunar New Year season. I adopted the role of a teacher-researcher. Through implementing this curriculum, I gained new insights into peer collaboration and ways of expanding students' cultural understanding, observation, critical-thinking and problem solving skills. Hopefully these students are more aware of their surroundings now, understand their cultural traditions better and can apply what they learned to their daily lives.