Philippines Independence Day - ESOL

 For today’s lesson in ESOL, we have decided to write about a significant cultural event that happens to our country. As you all may know, I’m from the Philippines and I’m going to be choosing one from a lot of different cultural events that happen in my culture. The one that I have chosen to write about is the Philippines Independence Day. Philippines Independence Day is an annual national holiday in the Philippines. Celebrated every 12th of June. It commemorates the independence of the Filipino people from the Spain Colonies. 

When it's independence day in the Philippines, people usually don't have work or school because again, it’s a public holiday. Instead, parades happen throughout the country. They walk on the streets of the Philippines, showcasing the beautiful cultural clothing. Those are called Filipiniana and Barong Tagalog. People would usually watch them pretty closely and cheer them on. 

Philippines Independence day is not only celebrated in the Philippines itself. Other countries like America and also here in New Zealand, mainly celebrated by the Filipinos since it’s their culture. I would now like to talk about the Independence day (week) that I celebrated here in New Zealand together with my friends here at school. Instead of just celebrating it on the day, we have decided to celebrate it for the whole week.

The first thing that we did on the first day is to introduce our language to our classmates. We teach them the basic Tagalog greetings. For the second day, we went out on the basketball courts to play some Filipino games that we have been playing since we were a child. The third day was the actual date of the independence day. That was when we performed the folk dances that we practised for weeks, we performed it in the auditorium. The one that I performed was called Carinyosa, a dance that you have to do with a partner. For the fourth day, me and my friends went back to the auditorium to watch the other performances that didn’t get the chance to perform the day before. Finally, the last day of the independence week happened at the auditorium again. The only difference was that instead of performing it in front of the people from our school, we performed it in front of our families. Same performances were performed except other modern performances were also performed. 

Thank you for reading!