In celebration of the Year of the Pig, we are featuring a series of blogposts on our website to highlight the Chinese New Year celebrations of Confucius Classroom and Mandarin Excellence Programme (MEP) schools. For the fifth post in the series, we the CNY celebrations of UCL Academy and Durham Johnston School.

UCL Academy

UCL Academy in London celebrated Chinese new year by decorating the school with Spring Festival couplets and “Fu” characters. The entire school also ate Chinese food for lunch, and if students ordered their food in Mandarin, they got their lunch for free! For the hongbao activity, if students said “Happy new year” in Mandarin to the Mandarin teachers, they received a hongbao. The students also had a Chinese fun fair with lion dance performance and Chinese dancing and art workshops.

Durham Johnston School

On 13th of February, Durham Johnston School held their annual Chinese New Year event for the whole of year 7. The students were able to take part in a range of activities such as painting, lantern making, calligraphy and bracelet making all with a Spring Festival theme. Many thanks to Mr Hu, one of the Durham Johnston Chinese teachers, for organising this event.

We would like to thank UCL Academy and Durham Johnston School for sharing their events with us.