Celebrations! Happy New Year!
This week we have been learning about Lunar New Year. We talked about how this festival is celebrated around the world. Last week, we enjoyed taking part in some fun activities, as some of our parents from Hong Kong came to school to talk to us about how Chinese New Year is celebrated. This week in our classrooms, we enjoyed many activities focussing on Lunar New year.
The children had to tidy the furniture in the small world house – can you sort the furniture so that it is the correct room? We also enjoyed making tea in the water tuff spot. They loved exploring the textures of the tea bags and the changes which took place in the colour of the water. They have also developed their pouring and transferring skills as they made their tea.
We also talked about how we get ready for a celebration and how it is traditional to clean your house to get ready for Chinese New Year. They took this task very seriously, as they cleaned the role play house before they decorated it. They noticed that many of the decorations were red and yellow and they made patterns using only red and yellow bobbins, cubes and pegboards.
In phonics, we are continuing to develop our listening skills and following instructions. We learnt how to play the game ‘Find Dex’. One child hid Dex, as another child had to wear a blindfold so they didn’t know where Dex was. After they took the blindfold off, they had to look for Dex and their friends beat the wooden blocks quitter or louder depending if they were close to Dex or far away. It’s very similar to the game Hot or Cold. They did really well understanding the instructions and everyone was very keen to have their eyes covered so that they could search for Dex.
In Maths, we have continued to look at numbers from 1-5 more closely. We have been subitising and saying how many we can see and also loved swatting the correct group to show groups of 1,2,3,4 or 5 camels. We have also been working on recognising how many objects are in our 5 frame. We also did the correct number of jump, taps on our knees, claps, as well as show that many fingers to match the number.
Block play is always very popular and this week the children were really creative as they made some fabulous play equipment for their themselves or the dolls. They made slides for the babies and seesaws for themselves. There was lots of trial and error and working together to make sure that their inventions worked. It was wonderful to see them so focussed as they planned together and listening to each other’s ideas.
