Canada Dexin Academy Participates in the Fourth Canada Chinese Poetry 300 Recitation Competition
On May 30, 2026, the Poetry Knowledge Challenge and awards ceremony of the Fourth Canada Chinese Poetry 300 Recitation Competition was held in Richmond Hill.
Students, parents, teachers, and guests from Chinese schools and community organizations across the Greater Toronto Area gathered for poetry challenges, recitation, and stage presentations celebrating the language and cultural richness of classical Chinese poetry.
Canada Dexin Academy participated as a supporting organization. Michael Xiao, Principal of Canada Dexin Academy, served as Executive Chair of the competition. The Academy also received the competition’s Outstanding Organization Award.
From Recitation to Understanding and Expression
The poetry challenge included groups for young children, elementary students, and secondary students. Beyond memorization, children engaged with meaning, cultural knowledge, and live responses—moving gradually from remembering poems to understanding them and expressing their own ideas.
For Chinese Canadian children growing up in Canada, classical poetry can also be a window into Chinese culture. Behind a poem may be a period of history, a person, a landscape, or emotions and memories shared across generations.
As children begin to understand why these words were written and why they have endured, Chinese learning moves beyond language alone and into a richer cultural world.
Chinese learning can begin with remembering a line, then grow into understanding, feeling, and expression
Seeing Children Connect with Poetry on Stage
Children of different ages shared their learning through recitation, live challenges, and parent–child reading. Some voices still carried the openness of early childhood; others expressed the emotions of a poem with growing confidence. Together, these varied voices gave classical poetry a new presence on a Canadian stage.
This reflects something Dexin values deeply: Chinese needs to be learned, and it also needs to be genuinely used.
A recitation, a story, or a stage presentation may seem small, but each gives children an opportunity to speak and express the Chinese they have learned in class.
While participating in entry collection, judging, and event organization, Principal Michael Xiao was repeatedly moved by the children’s performances.
The youngest participants brought innocence and spontaneity; elementary students showed increasingly rich expression; secondary students brought greater composure and interpretation. In a metaphor from his remarks that day, the children were like young people cupping water from a river of poetry flowing across a thousand years—their smiles reflected alongside their most direct affection for the poems.
More than the results of the competition, this may have been what mattered most.
Language Carries Culture, and Culture Helps Shape Character
The value of learning poetry is not measured only by how many works a child can recite.
As learning deepens, children move from a character or a line toward the history, people, emotions, and aesthetics within a poem, gradually developing their own understanding.
For Chinese education overseas, this process is especially meaningful.
Children live and learn in Canada’s multicultural environment while also discovering their cultural origins through Chinese. That understanding can begin with a poem or story and gradually become a more natural and lasting cultural connection.
By supporting this event and receiving its Outstanding Organization Award, Dexin hopes to work alongside more schools, families, and communities to create opportunities for children to learn and use Chinese, understand culture, and express themselves.
Poetry written across a thousand years continues to be read by each new generation.
Today, children growing up in Canada are also using their own voices to rediscover these words, understand their stories, and build a connection between their generation and Chinese culture.