Tet is the wonderful time for parents and children to spend time together with beautiful customs of our traditional Tet.
Sakura Montessori would like to give you some activities ideas for a more cheerful Tet holiday for children.
Chung cake and tet cake making
Making Chung cake and Tet cake with your children for Tet is not a bad idea. You can instruct them how to prepare ingredients such as sticky rice, peas, and Dong leaves (phrynium placentarium); or how to wash and cut Dong leaves, how to support adults during the process, or how to make little cakes themselves. Don’t forget to tell them the meaning of our traditional cakes, which are one of the typical items for Vietnamese Tet!
Cooking for Tet with mommy
Instead of leaving your children lying on the sofa watching TV or using the phone, you can invite them to join the Tet cooking with you. You can instruct them how to do some simple tasks such as washing vegetables, washing fruit, making some simple dishes, and decorating. While cooking together, you can introduce them to Tet dishes so that they can better understand Vietnamese food. They will surely be eager to help and enjoy the process all along!
Home decorating
Children tend to love cutting and decorating things in the home. Therefore, on this occasion of New Year, you can ask them to help you out with home decorations!
Instead of buying ready-to-use items for Tet decorations, you can make them with your children for fun. Your child can arrange flowers, make paper flowers, make red envelopes to put on the kumquat tree or peach blossom.
House cleaning with the family
Cleaning the house before Tet is one of the traditional activities of many Vietnamese households. You can ask your children to join you in repainting the house, arranging things around, sweeping the floor, polishing tables and chairs, dusting shelves, washing dishes, decorating special areas.
To motivate children, you should patiently guide them on how to do each task for their success. Even when they can’t make it, you still should encourage them so that they won’t get depressed.
Giving a hand to chores also helps children find themselves useful. Most importantly, this is a chance for them to reinforce good habits such as keeping things clean, protecting the environment, developing independence, cooperation skills, and sharing with people around.
Making the first new – year writing
The first New-Year writing has been a cultural custom of Vietnamese for generations. The first strokes of writing at the beginning of a new year convey respect for uprightness and the importance of learning. This custom is also done with the wish of good luck for the year to come.
So, remember to share with your children this custom to cultivate in them a love for learning!
Making new – year resolutions
It has been shown in many studies that, “With instructions and practice on how to make a personal plan from an early age, children tend to have good skills for plan and schedule making later in life.” This is the reason why educators encourage parents to make resolutions at the beginning of the year.
You can refer to five following steps to make New-Year resolutions with your children:
- Draw out goals and targets for the new year by talking and listening to your children and making interactive questions to encourage them to speak what they think. Then, finalise the most important ones.
- Help children understand what they can do to realise those goals: get them to think about what they can do and arrange them in priority order. You can give them hints for them to guess. In this way, they will be more active in making their own plans.
- Make a list of resolutions: Write down the list of resolutions in a notebook or similar things for easy tracking. To make it look more appealing, children can decorate it themselves, or draw instead of writing things, etc.
- Show children how to keep track of the list: Show them how to check and mark the progress of each item in the list until all the tasks have been finished.
- Encourage children: You should be open to your children and encourage them regularly to give them more motivation to follow up the list on a daily basis.
