Gung Hay Fat Choy

This week we have been fact experts, confident speakers and have enjoyed welcoming the year of the rat.

Within our personal, social and emotional development we have been developing our listening and attention skills. Using your tapestry observations from home we have shared your interesting facts about dinosaurs. I was impressed at how beautifully you sat and listened to your friend's facts and equally impressed at the confident speakers. I think we are all learning lots of interesting facts about dinosaurs.

To support our communication and language skills we have learnt some new words, Chinese Zodiac, parade, feast, fire crackers and thanks to George and Rosie (and Granma) Gung Hay Fat Choy. We shared the stories 'Lanterns and Fire Crackers' by Jonny Zucker and 'Dragon Dance' by Joan Holub to enhance our learning.

To enhance our physical development we have used scissors to snip and cut noodles and we have have used chopsticks and tweezers to transport noodles and rice. We have also used chopsticks to create Chinese symbols. We have also tasted some Chinese foods for our snacks including prawn crackers, egg friend rice, noodles and sweet and sour sauce,

Within our literacy sessions we have continued to share non-fiction books to find out about dinosaurs. We have particularly enjoyed looking at encyclopedias. We now know that these books help us to find out information and help us with any questions that we may have. We have also used pens and paints and paintbrushes to mark our own Chinese symbols.
Please see tapestry for this weeks phonics focus.

'The Great Race' by Emily Hiles has supported our mathematics development this week. We learned all about the story of the Chinese zodiac and found out that each year was named after an animal. The Jade Emperor decides there should be a race to decide the winner... We have taken part in our own races and then ordered the position that we have come. We have also ordered the animals of the Chinese Zodiac 1-12. Can you remember what position the rat came?

Chinese New Year has been the focus of our understanding of the world development this week and we have enjoyed a lovely introduction to the festival of the Chinese New Year. We followed on Cbeebies a family as they let of fire crackers, enjoyed a Chinese feast, watched lion and dragon dances and hung up lanterns to celebrate the start of their New Year and welcomed the year of the rat.

To develop our expressive arts and design skills we have created our own puppet dragons to perform our own dragon dance. First we used scissors to cut out our dragon face and then used water colours to paint 'bright' colours. We then attached our dragon head to it's body. Finally we used our dragons to dance in our very own dragon parade. We also created lanterns, these are hung up in our cloakroom area.

I hope you all had a lovely weekend,
Tara