Kung Hei Fat Choi! Happy New Year. This week we have been embracing and learning all about the festival of Chinese New Year. What a fabulous week it has been. Let's look through the weekly events. As always, we set the classroom up with lots of wonderful learning opportunities. We encourage the children to access them and learn more independent skills. Here are just a small selection. Enjoy 

We started the week off by creating drawings about the animals from the story The Great Race. We talked about who came first, second, third and so on and then created a story map. Take a look at our work 

We learned more about The Willow Pattern. We talked about the colours used and we created our own using paper plates. These are now on display in our classroom and man y people have admired them 

I am sure that the children have already told you but we have transformed our Gingerbread House into a Chinese Restaurant. We have been using chop sticks and wool to help us to develop our fine motor skills. Here we are in chopstick action 

We also put our Read Write Inc skills into practice and used the Internet and the information books we have to help us find out more information as to how Chinese New Year is celebrated. Our fact finding skills are coming on a treat 

We also enjoyed creating our own paper concertina dragons. We folded, stretched and cut all things red and green - red is a lucky colour! Then we got busy folding, bending and creating. This is the final product. We loved using them in PE to dance with 

We also created and made Chinese New Year cards in our writing area. We studied Chinese characters and recreated them in our own cards. We talked about how these cards are different from the ones we may send at Christmas time 

What has been amazing this week is the children's interest and enthusiasm about learning all about a different culture. The children have gone home and done some further fact finding and have loved sharing this knowledge with their friends. A big thank you from me! 

However, the absolute highlight of our week has been our Dragon and Lion dancing in the hall. We have loved moving in time to the music with our home made dragon puppets 

We also took our dragon dancing outside. We used drums and cymbols to create music. We had a great time following the leader and moving up, down and side to side in time to the music. 

We have also been learning about the year we were born in. Those children born in 2019 were born in the year of the pig and those children born in 2020 were born in the year of the rat. Do you know what year you were born in? Why not find out? 

We ended the week with a Chinese feast of noodles, prawn crackers and fortune cookies. Here we are enjoying our snack 

Next week we are back to our learning about Traditional Tales. Next week we will be using the text The Three Little Pigs to focus our learning. Please click on the link below to listen to the story before Monday 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNYBQsay_Ek

Have a wonderful weekend

Staff and Children in Reception W