Once a time a year, the beautiful lanterns catch the eyes, the glutinous rice balls tempt the tongues. New Brunswick Confucius Institute at Saint John campus held attractive Lantern festival celebrations. The Lantern Festival celebrations lasted for half a month, and has successfully concluded on March 19th, 2018. Thanks for all the supports and helps of school leaders and CINB leaders and teachers.

This event includes four parts respectively, Lantern Festival custom experiencing, lantern producing, lantern riddles guessing, and online "CINB Lantern Star" voting. Students from the mandarin class researched the origin and customs of the Lantern Festival, and tasted the glutinous rice balls as well. Additionally, with the help of the art teachers and mandarin teacher, they designed and completed producing of lanterns. The Students combined Chinese pinyin, Chinese characters and the essence of Chinese traditional culture with the lanterns and turn them into vivid traditional Chinese lanterns. Combined with the old traditions and innovative ways, the ancient culture comes to life again.

This time, New Brunswick Confucius Institute at Saint John campus came up with an innovative idea, to display the lanterns both in the school and online. When in the school, the lanterns are displayed in the hall way and library of their schools, where all the students can appreciate lanterns and participate in the Lantern Riddle guessing easily, thus the three schools are all immersed in the Festival atmosphere. Besides that, online voting for CINB Lantern Star is also started.30 different lanterns are displayed online, and everyone can vote for the best one, with the voting results, the top three will be chosen.

Online "CINB Lantern Star" received a lot of attention. 30 students participated in the online voting program. In only 5 days, the Website has been visited for nearly 8000 times, the lanterns earned almost 1000 “likes”. Myles St. Pierre and Brittney Gallant from St. Malachy's Memorial High school student won the first place and the third place, Mexican students Sergio Hernandez Ramos from Harbor View High School got a second with 228 “likes”. Mandarin students passed along the festival spirit to their families, friends, classmates, teachers via the internet, the spirit has even been spread to every part of Saint John, Canada, China, the United States, even Mexico. The whole world are celebrating the Lantern festival together!

Read more ...