Bonne Année!

Gong Hey Fat Choy!

‘Fan’-tastic Chinese New Year Fun

with Fen Fen!

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 tiger and most of us were born in the year of the rabbit!

On Friday, we all came to school dressed in the colours of good luck (red) and happiness (yellow) and welcomed our friend Fen Fen who providing a range of exciting experiences to help us understand the traditional festivities that will take place when the ‘Year of the Monkey’ begins.   Fen Fen 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 a everybody joining in with a special performance using fans to dance to traditional Chinese music. 

  Gong Hey Fat Choy!

Happy Chinese New Year 2016!

   Didn't you know?...

"There's no such thing as a GRUFFALO!" 

We came into school on Monday to discover a Gruffalo's cave in Yellow Base! We have spent the whole week re-enacting our favourite Julia Donaldson stories and dressing up; playing with puppets; creating 'Stick Man' families; making 'Room on the Broom' rhyming spells, searching for numbers and ordering them on our 'Gruffalo Hunt' and even making our own 'Gruffalos' from playdough! 

This wonderful collection of books, rhymes and songs have provided us with highly engaging learning opportunities and inspired us to pick up a book and read whenever we get the chance!

Our Reception author is...

Julia Donaldson!

We have thoroughly enjoyed all the exciting events of Emmaus Book Week 2016.  Our Reception families have supported us by coming into school for our storytelling session with Liverpool librarians; staying in school with us to share books in our classes and even treating us to some glorious new books from our school book shop.  We also had the opportunity to meet a real author when David Webb visited to share some stories with us.  Our Reception author is Julia Donaldson and we have loved reading her stories every day in class and bringing in some of her books from home to share with our friends. We made our own 'Stickman families', cast rhyming 'Room on the Broom' spells, played in our 'Guffalo cave' role play area and created our own 'Gruffalos' using playdough!  The highlight of Book Week was a very special day that we spent with our Nursery friends, sharing some of our favourite books such as 'Room on the Broom' and 'The Gruffalo', we dressed up and retold these amazing stories using puppets and props.  On Friday afternoon, we even went on an exciting 'Gruffalo Hunt' followed by a Gruffalo tea party to celebrate the end of a wonderful book week!

'Chilling out' in 2016!

After our winter walk, we came back inside and had lots of questions and some interesting ideas about ice, snow and frost.  We used the internet and read lots of stories and information books before investigating what happens to water when it is placed in different temperatures.  We dressed up as scientists and decided to try to make some ice and snow to observe in class. 

Our icy investigation led us to the school kitchen where the cook allowed us to leave one bucket of water in the huge school freezer, we also left one bucket in our warm classroom and one bucket outside, then we waited until the next day to discover how the cold temperature had caused the water (liquid) to freeze/change into a solid (ice).  It didn't take long for us to watch how quickly the ice melted in our warm hands back to a liquid once again.