RW – What have we been up to this week?

Chinese New Year

This week we have been learning all about Chinese New Year. The children have had lots of fun with their learning this week…

PSED – To value ourselves as an individual.

We learnt about Chinese New Year and why people celebrate. We discussed how each year is named after an animal and how this year is the ‘Year of the Tiger’. The children thought about the different characteristics of a tiger and thought about how they are similar.

UW – To recognise some similarities and differences between life in this country and life in another country.

We discussed how life in China may be different to life in the United Kingdom. We spoke about how our food is different to food in China. We learnt about some of these different foods and even had the opportunity to taste some of them! We tried noodles, crackers, soy sauce and sweet chilli sauce. We were able to say whether we liked these foods or not. We even tried to eat our food using chopsticks!

C&L To use talk to explain how people celebrate Chinese New Year.

EAD – To explore and use a variety of artistic effects.

The children used a variety of different art media to create their own Chinese lanterns. They developed fine motor skills when using scissors to cut to a point and explored collage.

Maths – To explore the composition of the number 7.

In Maths this week we have been developing our understanding of the number 7. We looked at pictures of rainbows and identified that a rainbow has 7 colours. We used this knowledge to make our own rainbow inspired Chinese dragons. We self selected seven different colours and used these to colour in our dragons, always making sure we only had seven colours.

Literacy – To write about the story of Chinese New Year.

We shared the story of Chinese New Year. The children used their phonic knowledge to write short sentences with words with known letter-sound correspondences. Some of the children developed their reading skills to read words and put them in the correct order to form a sentence.

Maths – To order numbers.

We read the story of Chinese New Year and acted it out. We put the animals in order as to where they came in the race developing our understanding of number order.

Busy Bee Time.

During independent choosing time this week we have been using numicon to build a Chinese dragon, collaging in the creative area, developing fine motor skills when colouring in and when using chopsticks to pick up beads and creating patterns with the peg boards. In the writing area this week we used our name cards to try and write our own names in Chinese writing.