What Is The Lunar New Year Truly About?
For those who celebrate the Lunar New Year, the festival seems to be all about visitations, steamboats, cookies and red packets. Like many other festivals, the Lunar New Year has evolved to take on different meanings and significance over its long history.
At the astrological and cultural level, the Lunar New Year is a celebration of the new year according to the lunar calendar, based on the monthly cycles of the moon’s phases. Come 22 January, the first day of the Lunar Year, a new moon will appear in the night sky. Believed to have started more than 3000 years ago during the Shang Dynasty, the Lunar New Year originated as a custom where sacrifices are made to ancestors or gods, or nature is worshipped to bless harvests at the turn of the year. Symbolically, the Lunar New Year celebrates a new beginning.
Today, perhaps what people associate most with the Lunar New Year is the social aspect of the occasion – the family reunion. At its core, the Lunar New Year is about family – be they blood relations or close friends.

For those who celebrate the Lunar New Year, getting your child to write about their festival experience is a good way to reflect on what it means to them. Here are two composition questions to get your child thinking!
Show these questions to your children and ask them to think about what they would write as the Lunar New Year approaches. Watch their attitudes toward the holiday change.
Question for Primary School Students
Write a composition of at least 150 words about the reunion. The pictures are provided to help you think about this topic. Your composition should be based on one or more of these pictures.
Consider the following points when you plan your composition:
- Who were the people involved?
- What did the people do?
Question for Secondary School Students
Video conferencing tools are an excellent way for family members to gather during special occasions.” What are your views?
As you may have noticed, those questions are written using the PSLE and O-Level composition styles. It’s no coincidence, as those prompts were meant to familiarise students with the question format for these watershed examinations.
Our MOE English Specialist teachers have written two model compositions based on our shared questions for your children to read. What better time for your children to read them than during this extended holiday?
Your children will be better able to appreciate and relate to the topic while soaking up the New Year festivities. We hope these will stimulate insightful discussions among you and your children about the significance of the Lunar New Year and strengthen family bonds.
Click on the links below for the model compositions for the respective levels.
Share them with your child, and here’s wishing you and your child a Joyous Lunar New Year!
Model Compositions
PSLE Model Composition: Reunion
O-Level Model Composition: Family Gatherings and Video Conferencing
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