Happy Lunar New Year! We have been celebrating throughout our school.

To mark the year of the Rabbit – the luckiest animal in the Chinese zodiac – students and staff came to school on Monday wearing rabbit ears and accessories. Our day started with an assembly from Year 8 who performed a play explaining how the animals were assigned their positions in the zodiac.

We were delighted to welcome some of our Prep School students to the Senior School for the celebrations. The highlight of the day was our magnificent Dragon parade which has become a bit of a school tradition. Our Year 5 pupils had a fantastic time being led around by Senior School students as they paraded around the paddock with the colourful dragons, representing the four school house colours. The dragons were accompanied by our amazing Samba Band who had a lot of fun making as loud a noise as possible – fully encouraged as part of the celebrations as it is believed that loud noises scare away evil spirits and banishes bad luck. The impressive looking dragons were handmade by our boarders last January with students from the different houses helping with the decorations. They turned out so beautifully we have been able to use them again this year, and hope to continue using them year after year for this very purpose.

More photos of our celebrations are here on Flickr

Our Nursery children have been busy celebrating Lunar New Year too: painting dragons, making dragon puppets and practising their mark making in red sand. Red is considered to be a very auspicious colour Chinese culture, symbolising joy, good fortune, prosperity and happiness.

Huge thanks to our catering team Holroyd Howe for their tremendous efforts in making it as festive as possible for our boarders who celebrate the Lunar New Year. They adorned the dining hall in festive red with lots of rabbit themed decorations and cooked a fantastic Chinese New Year’s Eve feast for our boarders on Saturday evening.