Through centuries of shared history, Chinese customs has endured.

For a decade, Lone Peak Elementary has immersed students in that culture, celebrating Chinese food, arts and traditions.

Instead of limiting a Chinese New Year celebration to a school assembly, Lone Peak incorporated parts for the 15-day festival into a week to give students a better understanding of the importance of Chinese New Year, said organizers Debbie Jorgensen and Sarah Erwin.

“We want the kids to get a feel for the culture. Since Chinese New Year is such a big event, it's impossible to do it in one day,” Jorgensen said. “You want the kids to feel like they've been transported to China or Taiwan, but we can’t take away a lot from instruction time. It's worth the time we have given to share with them Chinese culture. If we can open these kids minds to the grander picture of a human family, we've done something good for them. We're helping them to see the world.”

Jorgensen and Erwin have headed the Lone Peak celebration for eight years, so they’ve been able to accumulate a lot of ideas and adjust it for every year—including during COVID-19.

“The kids love it, and the teachers love it. We involve the entire school,” she said, adding that this year, the school’s morning announcements were in Chinese and English.

Each morning, students also took part in morning exercises in their classes; those were shared by a kung fu teacher Erwin knows.

“We wanted our kids to get a sense of how students in Chinese start out their school day with everybody in the schoolyard doing the same exercises in rows; it's pretty cool to see,” she said. “We wanted to have them try those exercises. It's good for them physically and mentally to start the day. Since it's such a strong tradition there, we knew it was one thing we can do so they can get the feeling of how it is for them.”

Erwin also contacted a teacher who filmed her Chinese students doing a new year presentation in English and again in Chinese, which was shared with Lone Peak students along with pictures of places, food and traditions.

“We watched four videos, one each day that were three to five minutes long,” Jorgensen said. “One was on new year’s traditions, one was on food, one was on places in China and one was what we did over COVID, a Chinese shadow puppet show, which is a big Chinese tradition. It was made three years ago when my son Scott was in the fifth grade and a bunch of kids were over, so they did a puppet show that we filmed it. It’s kind of fun because 10 years ago, Sarah and a couple other dual immersion parents had to fundraise to have Chinese New Year activities before PTA budgeted for it and they did the first shadow puppet show for the school.”

Another tradition the school did was to have a parade through the school with its lion head, mastered by Principal Tracy Stacy. With an extended red fabric, they performed under the pretense it was a dragon for the Year of the Dragon. School children lined the hallways to take part in the celebration. Then, each day during the week, teachers in every classroom would randomly draw or select students to get their photos taken with its head. 

“It was simple, but fun. They got excited about that,” Jorgensen said.

Each day during the week, students and staff received red envelopes with little presents, much like the Chinese tradition.

“Everyone gets the gift every day—lucky coins, bookmarks, candy, chopsticks, water bottle stickers of zodiac animals and dragons for the Year of the Dragon. Again, simple, but an important custom,” she said. “With those, I asked our five immersion teachers what their favorite Chinese quote or saying is so we gave each of those quotes to every single kid in the school.” 

On Friday, the school welcomed Su Mama Chinese Club from Taiwan. Those older students paraded in a lion dance, played Chinese music, took part in cultural dances and demonstrated their traditional yo-yo performance much to the cheering and delight of Lone Peak students.

It was an amazing and nearly flawless performance, Erwin said.

“My favorite moment was when the yo-yo girl had a little bit of a problem. I think she wanted to stop and then our students started cheering her on. I started crying in that moment. It was just really a cool message for our kids. A lot of high-functioning families and students feel like everything has to be perfect. I love that message that even when you're exceptional at something, like she is, sometimes she'll drop it and you can just keep going. It was pretty cool because even though they’re learning the language, they weren’t speaking it to them. It was just this moment of human encouragement that I loved,” she said. “It’s just really special to have this performing group come because you can’t find a group of this talent in the U.S.”

Lone Peak fifth-grade students also took to the stage performing “The Great Race” written and directed by Jorgensen based on a play by Andrew Forbes. Janie Owens was the assistant director.

While the play featuring zodiac animals has been performed in previous years, this year Jorgensen rewrote it twice to adjust for more students and to include characters based on Chinese historical figures.

Fifth-grader Addison Pack was one of the new characters; she was Jade Empress’ scribe.

“I liked being on a ladder under the blue sky,” she said about the set designed by Bonny Steele and Becky Goins. “I’ve been able to learn about ‘The Great Race’ and how the Chinese zodiac came to be.”

Addison, who hopes to go to Shanghai with her family next year, said she loved the Chinese dancing and yo-yo performed by the Su Mama Chinese Club as well as the morning exercises they did all week.

“Everything has been really fun, but those are my favorites,” she said.

Her classmate, George Ellsworth, was the monkey in the play. 

“My favorite part was learning about each character’s traits,” he said. “The hardest part for me was memorizing my lines, but once I got it down, it was easy. I was excited about performing my first play in front of 600 people.”

George wants to continue to study Chinese through high school and college.

Both students began learning the language in first grade, as did Jorgensen’s and Erwin’s children. The two parents were amongst those who lobbied the state legislature to continue funding the dual language immersion program.

“My family started our dual immersion journey about 11 years ago when I was looking for just kind of an advanced educational option for my oldest son,” Jorgensen said adding her other three students also are part of Chinese dual immersion. “I feel strongly about being bilingual, and the opportunities that will offer children and into their adulthood. It opens their mind culturally to different people, languages and culture. When you can speak to someone in their own language, you really move beyond the boundaries of mere communication and to move into understanding. My hope and my goal is to open people's eyes, feel the love of the program, and the love of people and of culture. We're more alike than we are different.”

The week-long celebration ended with students rotating to try Chinese calligraphy on bookmarks or paper cutting, play with the Chinese drum or Chinese yo-yos, or learn Chinese jump rope and Chinese shuttlecock.

“Each activity engaged students in cultural highlights of life in China and Taiwan. We wanted the kids, whether they are in dual immersion or not, to have fun, be a world citizen and give them real cultural exposure,” Erwin said.

Much as generations share Chinese tradition, so too, will be the way of Lone Peak. After nine years at Lone Peak, Stacy will serve as Butler Elementary’s principal next fall; Jorgensen will move on to help with Chinese customs at the middle school level where her youngest son will be enrolled, and Erwin will help bridge Lone Peak’s Chinese New Year celebration to others.

“It’s been a long time since we held a Chinese book fair to raise funds for a new year celebration,” Erwin said. “But every year, the kids are super excited. The teachers are appreciative, and it feels like we're honoring others before us. I love seeing our kids be enriched with language and culture.”λ