Every year, the early summer sunshine experiences a festive vibe due to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The sunshine in May is like the tenderness felt under the shade of a mother’s hand, a firm tenderness that is constantly sheltering the child from the wind and rain. The sunshine in June is like the vitality of a father’s gaze, a positive vitality that constantly encourages the child.
Due to the pandemic, students were particularly grateful for Mother’s Day this year, as the mothers in May have been working through different kinds of challenges over the past two months to provide for their families. This year’s Father’s Day also made students feel more empathetic toward their dads – fathers continued their work online in May, but when June arrived they went ‘back to the office’, not forgetting, though, to take their children outside to enjoy nature and the long-awaited sunshine.
The pandemic will end, but the ability to ‘feel love’ and ‘express love’ is something that will live on forever. Throughout May and June, all our middle school subject departments worked together to ‘feel love’ and ‘express love’, expressing their gratitude to parents over the past few months through various activities.
In Chinese classes, beautiful texts on parental love were recited to amplify students’ voices, and essays on parental love were recorded to express students’ emotions.
In English, students used their newly-learned sentence patterns to record memorable moments with parents during the home study period, and made beautiful Father’s Day cards in handwritten and electronic formats, highlighting their care by recording their love and expressing their sincerity.
In art, students used their creativity by drawing cartoons to convey their gratitude, and seized the opportunity to help their families sort out their clothes in order to create portraits of their loved ones using their imaginations.
In music, students performed a ‘cloud chorus’, bringing together photos of beautiful parent-child moments to produce a music video filled with gratitude – the touching images and singing together formed a beautiful gift of love.
‘Normal life’ under the pandemic may have seemed to have come to a halt, but in fact moral guidance from mothers and fathers and harmonious parent-child relationships made the pandemic period a more emotional and special time. Through the pandemic, we have been strengthened by our love for each other – we have been able to retain our love for each other and have fortified our dedication to each other for the future.