Let's Celebrate the New Year!

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

Just before the end of term I was lucky enough to watch a Spanish lesson given by Simon Iglesias to a mixed class of Year 5 and 6 which included talking about the New Year celebrations as part of the KS2 Intercultural Understanding objectives. Simon had wanted to show the class a video clip from YouTube - but as this is inaccessible in most UK primaries you need to download it at home first onto a memory stick, using a site such as zamzar (enter the url of the video and they email it to you) or mediaconverter.org (paste in the url and click convert to .wmv and download).

To the delight of the class, rather than just tell them about the Doce Uvas tradition, Simon then distributed 12 grapes to every child and used the IWB timer to set a chime that mimics the New Years Eve bells, encouraging the children to eat one grape per chime, in order to bring good luck for every month of the coming year. They loved it - and frankly I've never seen children eat so much fruit or so quickly! You can find a selection of timers to download here.

New Year's Eve is celebrated in a wide variety of ways around the world - check out Wikipedia to find out more. In France it is called the fete of Saint Sylvestre, similarly in Germany it is called Silvester Neujahr. Now you possibly wouldn't want to try Bleigießen with molten lead in your classroom - but could an alternative be to try it out using toffee? or melted chocolate into iced water? Possibly linking the idea with science and a discussion of liquids and solids in case your head needs more persuading of the educational validity of the project before letting you do it in class?! Or maybe just settle for making some Neujahrskarte (New Year cards) which are more popular than Christmas cards in German speaking countries.

You can find plenty of simple New Year themed make'n'do activities in French to print out on Teteamodeler.com or why not team up with a partner school and start a joint calender on powerpoint? Your class pick 6 photos/images for 6 months and insert them into powerpoint pages, creating tables for the dates of the month below on separate ppt slides, ask your partner school to do the same for the remaining six months. Email them to each other at the end of the year, collate & print them out/laminate and maybe even sell them for school funds.

There are a few sites on the web for those wanting to explore further: Merpy's New year celebration let's you pick a language to find out how to say Happy new year, AboutFrench.com gives you some general information and a wordsearch, zzzebra Netz has a German New Year poem, TimeandDate.com shows which countries will start the New Year first, and fathertimes.net has lots of fascinating traditions for celebrating New Year all around the world.

Finally - one more YouTube clip for anyone wanting to celebrate with their class when we get back to school in 2009 - This is 'Wish you Happy New Year in 34 Languages'

[Mark Purves]

Brilliant Jo - thanks for this -