Welcome back to our class blog. We hope that you had a wonderful half term. This week we have been learning about Chinese New Year also known as Lunar New Year. This has been a great week for learning more about different celebrations. Let's take a look at some of the lovely invitations to play and learn we have explored this week 

We started the week of by listening to the story of The Great Race - a lovely description as to how the Chinese zodiac came to be. We learned about the Emperor instigating a race for all of the animals and the promise as to whoever won the race would have the new year named after them. We used this information to help us create a story map according to the position the animals finished the race. Take a look at our maps 

We created a restaurant space in our classroom and used chopsticks to help us understand more about the culture and celebrations. It was tricky but a great funky finger activity and we soon mastered the art of using chopsticks by practice and determination. Here we are in action 

To help us learn more about the celebration of Chinese New Year we watched clips on the Internet. We discovered that many people receive money in red envelopes as a sign of good luck and good health. So we created our own versions of the money envelopes. We hope that you enjoyed your child sharing with you the messages behind the envelopes 

We also explored and tasted fortune cookies. We shared the cookies with our friends and listened to the grown ups read the messages to us. We loved finding out our fortunes 

We also looked the importance and significance of cherry blossom. We used these to influence our fan patterns and designs. We discovered that China can get very hot in Summer and many people use fans to help keep themselves cool 

We also had a great time adding blossom details to trees using different materials. Look at how proud we are of our work 

We have been thinking about how we can use both books and the Internet as a means of finding out information. We created some questions that we wanted to ask google to help us learn more about Chinese New Year. We thought of lots of amazing questions for example ...

How many people make a dragon dance? Anthony

Why is red and gold considered lucky colour? Olivia

What are the numbers that are considered lucky? Joel

Here are some of the answers to our questions 

We have also explored how symbols are used in China. We looked at how some of the animals from the story of The Great Race are written and had a try at our own versions. Look at the amazing work we produced 

We even took the theme of Chinese New Year into our Maths area. Here we are exploring how to make repeating patterns using coloured blocks designed to look like one of the dragons bodies. Great work everyone! 

Next week we will start our learning all about Growth. For the remainder of the half term we will look in detail at the growth of plants, animals and ourselves! We will be exploring lots of lovely texts that will help develop and deepen our knowledge. The first text we will use is the lovely story Jaspers Beanstalk. If you would like to listen to the story before Monday please click on the link below - 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=23INhyreb8M 

Have a wonderful weekend

Staff and children in Reception W