Tous Ensemble, En Chemin Avec Jesus
Happy Chinese New Year!
Kung hei fat choy!
We began our Chinese New Year celebrations this week. After using the internet to find out about the customs and traditions of the festival, we set about cleaning and decorating our home corner, ready for the celebration. We made lanterns, fans and lucky red envelopes filled with chocolate coins! We took our artwork outside to create a Chinese lion and a dragon using big boxes and huge rolls of material and enjoyed making our own lucky red playdough and decorated our dough creations with gold and red loose parts. We developed our understanding of ordinal numbers when we retold the legend of 'the great animal race', discovering that some of us were born in the year of the rabbit and most of us were born in the year of the dragon!
Chinese Restaurant role play
Creative Activities and Fine Motor Fun!
On Thursday, we all came to school dressed in the colours of good luck (red) and good fortune (yellow) and welcomed our friend Fenfen who provided a range of exciting experiences to help us understand the ‘Year of the Rooster’. Fenfen talked about how Chinese families celebrate this special festival, showing us lucky charms, real dancing Chinese dragons and lions and told us ancient Chinese stories. After learning how to greet each other in Mandarin and singing a 'New Year' song together, we watched Fen Fen perform traditional Chinese dancing. We ended the day with everybody joining in with a special performance using fans to dance to traditional Chinese music.
Fan Dancing with Fenfen!
Learning about Chinese traditions with Fenfen
The whole school were excited to see us when we visited each class with our carefully made Chinese dragon, playing drums & chimes as we paraded. We were delighted to be rewarded with chocolate coins and fortune cookies from all the teachers and we even enjoyed a Chinese banquet prepared by the kitchen staff for school dinner too!
Our dragon parade around the school!
Enjoying our Chinese banquet
