Shamrock Chinese School Rings In Year Of The Dog

The Shamrock Chinese School began festivities this weekend in preparation for Chinese New Year which will be the Year of the Dog.

The Chinese School runs every Saturday from 9am to 1pm and has about 90 students currently enrolled. It leases classrooms at Fallon Middle School in Dublin.

Their mission is to provide culturally vivid and accurate Chinese language arts to the Tri-Valley area. Students start as young as 5 years of age and are introduced to Chinese culture, art and language. Shamrock Chinese School offers Mandarin classes from Kindergarten through 8th grade in addition to drawing and chess classes. New student enrollment is open all year through.

School Principal, Ms. Zheng Rong, explained that the celebratory event has been steadily growing and that there are plans to include traditional dancing next year. She describes Chinese as a musical language with five tones where one word can have ten different meanings depending on the pronunciation. “It’s a beautiful, complicated and rhythmic language to learn” she said.

Chinese New Year takes place on a different date each year, because it is based on the lunar calendar. For the special event held last weekend activities were set up ranging from games to calligraphy. Other ways of celebrating include bell ringing, lighting firecrackers and watching traditional dances. There is also a custom of handing out red envelopes containing ‘lucky money' and good wishes on New Year's Day and volunteers at the local event were delighted to receive theirs.

Displays of artwork created by the students, under the expert guidance of art teacher and artist, Ms. Chunhui Meng were also available for viewing. The artwork included sketches, water colors and creatively arranged koi ponds made of paper and clay. Ms. Chunhui Meng is passionate about teaching art and encourages her students to express their creativity in the pieces they produce.

Students are not only Dublin residents and Colleen, who brings her grandson Gideon to the school every weekend, hails from Castro Valley. Colleen has spent time teaching English in Taiwan and finds the Chinese language to be wonderfully expressive. She enjoys spending time with Gideon and encouraging him to learn and has had some humorous moments when some of the words they practiced in class yielded very different and somewhat embarrassing meanings.

“Having parents support the learning journey of their children is wonderful as only practicing a language once per week is not ideal,” says Ms. Zheng “the more they can practice, speak and read Chinese the better”.

The school encourages volunteer participation and parents, middle schoolers and high school students are all welcome. Volunteering helps students to improve their organizational skills and lets them practice speaking Chinese.

With the aim of celebrating diversity in the Tri-Valley and introducing Chinese language and culture to society, the school holds several events throughout the year and besides the Chinese New Year Party there is a Chinese vocabulary competition, artwork exhibition, chess invitational and Chinese speech competition. All these events are free and open to the public.

Currently Ms. Zheng Rong is in the process of registering the school as a non-profit organization in order to increase their funding so that they can provide a wider range of learning opportunities for their students.

Anyone interested in learning Chinese or volunteering at the school is welcome to contact them by email to shamrockchineseschool@gmail.com