week ending 8th February 2019
Hello and welcome back to our class blog. This week we have moved away from traditional stories to focus on Chinese New Year. This enhancement has given us lots of opportunities to explore different cultures and to compare and contrast traditions and events.
We started the week off by looking at some Chinese artefacts. We looked at calendars and discovered what year we were all born in, we looked at cooking utensils and compared them to what we might use and we explored traditions such as lanterns and money envelopes. The children have had a busy time learning and exploring.
We looked at Chinese symbols and how they represent letters and numbers. Here we are taking part in one of our challenges this week to choose, write and share with a friend a number. Great for our number development and our hand eye co-ordination 
We also explored clay. We sculpted and moulded clay to create a dragon. We then added texture using clay tools to create scales, we used a special tool to make claws and we added water because through trial and error we discovered that this helped to may the clay stick together. We have displayed these in clay and they are well worth a visit.
We also completed a chopstick challenge. We had to collect as many different sized pom poms as possible in one minute. We then had to count an irregular group of them and record our number. Tricky but we never ever give up.
We also took part in a series of activities linked to Safer Internet Day. We talked about the different uses of the Internet and created a map. We also looked at some suggestions and talked about whether we thought they were a safe use of the Internet
We also opened some fortune cookies and read the messages. Some of the messages were very interesting and we have been promised riches and good health
Next week is our final week on traditional tales and we will be focusing on the Gingerbread Man. We are so very excited. Who knows we might even make some!
Have a great weekend
Staff and children in Reception W