Dragon Boat Festival Celebrations in the Nest

Highlights of the Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in the Nest

Nest teachers prepared a variety of interesting classroom activities to attract our little children to actively participate in them, and laughter lingered at both ends of the network. At the same time, this is a great opportunity for family-school education. Parents made exquisite short videos of Traditional Chinese Tales Time one after another. We were delighted and moved by the smiling faces of children, the scenes carefully arranged by parents, and the catchy poems and tales.

At 9am on 27th May, the Nest Assembly celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival was moved to TEAMS, connected every child online. This was also our first attempt to hold an online Assembly. The Nest has been celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival since 2019, from the first Poetry Conference to the Parent-Child performances to this year's online culture week. Every year, we are changing the mode to provide children with different experiences. Children use their tender senses to touch and feel, and slowly experience the subtle influence of Chinese traditional culture in daily life.

As educators, we know that in information processing, memory will encode, store and extract the input information. If cultural content is not introduced, it is just rigid teaching. If Chinese characters are not reproduced after entering the brain, it is only short-term memory and cannot be stored in the brain for a long time. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, found the forgetting curve. One of his experiments on memory found that it is easier to remember meaningful materials, but it takes more effort to memorize them by rote learning; The better the understanding effect of memory, the slower it is to forget. Therefore, it can be seen that the cultural information and stories behind Chinese characters are particularly important, which can help children consolidate their existing knowledge of Chinese characters. Therefore, the teaching in the  Nest is not rigid, and the reserve of cultural knowledge has been integrated into daily teaching.