Le 30 janvier 2025, les enseignants chinois de l'Institut Confucius en Artois Wei Wenke, Qiu Shuzhen et Xu Meng ont été invités au collège Denis Diderot à Dainville pour mener une série d'activités de célébration du Nouvel An chinois. L'événement a duré quatre heures et a été suivi par un total d'environ 120 élèves du collège.
The first session of the Chinese New Year celebration activities was a calligraphy workshop with Mr. Wei Wenke. Mr. Wei introduced the Chinese New Year custom of putting up the Chinese character ‘福’ meaning good fortune on the gate. He also presented the main elements of the calligraphy, included holding the brush, sitting, and dipping the ink, so that students were prepared to experience the writing of Chinese characters. Next, Mr. Wei led the students in tracing the different fonts of the Chinese characters ‘福’(good fortune) and ‘蛇’(snake, as 2025 is the year of snake). With Mr. Wei's patient explanation, guidance and demonstration, the students wrote the Chinese character ‘福’. At the end of the session, Mr. Wei gave the students his work of characters ‘福’(good fortune), ‘爱’ (love) and ‘和’(harmony) as a New Year's gifts and encouraged them to continue to learn Chinese and write more Chinese characters.
The second and third sessions were devoted to the New Year's Tea Party experience with Ms. Qiu Shuzhen. Ms. Qiu decorated the tea table with three-dimensional paper cut-outs of the Chinese character
‘春’, as well as small red flowers, and introduced the students to the ways of serving tea during the
Chinese New Year period when visiting friends and relatives. The students learnt about the six major types of tea, tea in life and tea in culture in China. They tasted a white tea and an oolong tea together and learnt the etiquette of pouring and receiving tea. At the end, they exchanged their feelings and experience about drinking Chinese tea and the students gave positive feedback to the tea experience.
The fourth session was a Taijiquan experience with Mr. Xu Meng. Mr. Xu first led the students to do a warm-up exercise, then he performed the 18 essential Chen-style Taijiquan movements and introduced the theoretical knowledge of Taijiquan to the students. Afterwards, Mr. Xu taught the students three basic Taijiquan movements and some Chen-style Taijiquan moves. During the process, he used the Chinese words ‘ one, two, three, four.... ’ to give instructions, inviting the students to learn the Taijiquan moves while reading along, so as to experience the characteristics of Chinese pronunciation.
This Chinese New Year celebration activities brought the Chinese New Year culture to the school's Chinese learners, as well as the school's English learners. Both Chinese and English are of the foreign language elective course at the school, and experiencing the Chinese New Year culture sparked many students' interest in and understanding of Chinese language and art.