Holidays Around the World: Celebrate Chinese New Year

Children have never had so many reasons to learn how Chinese people everywhere ring in the new and ring out the old. As China takes its new place on the global stage, understanding Chinese culture and values becomes ever more essential to our next generation.

For two joyous weeks red is all around. The color represents luck and happiness. Children receive money wrapped in red paper, and friends and loved ones exchange poems written on red paper. The Chinese New Year is also an opportunity to remember ancestors, and to wish peace and happiness to friends and family. The holiday ends with the Festival of Lanterns, as many large communities stage the famous Dragon Dance. Fireworks, parades, lanterns, presents, and feasts: these are some of the joys experienced by all who observe Chinese New Year.

Celebrate Chinese New Year is the latest, timely addition to National Geographic’s popular Holidays Around the World series. With 25 colorful images and a simple, educational text, the book is a lively invitation to revel in this child-friendly, national and international holiday. Carolyn Otto brings the historical and cultural aspects of the Chinese New Year into focus, and young readers experience the full flavor of an event celebrated by over a billion people in China, and countless others worldwide.

National Geographic supports K-12 educators with ELA Common Core Resources.
Visit www.natgeoed.org/commoncore for more information.The author of more than 20 books, Carolyn Otto is best known for her award-winning children's nonfiction titles, including the Scholastic Science Readers Wolves and Spiders, and What Color is Camouflage? in the HarperCollins Let-Read-and-Find-Out Science Series. Carolyn, who has also written poetry and fiction for children as well as adults, has a BA in English from Colorado College. She earned her MA from NYU while concurrently working for a major publishing company in New York. After a number of years in New York, she returned to her native Colorado. She lives in Colorado Springs with her dog, Belle.