Chinese New Year!

Last week in FS2 we celebrated Chinese New Year.

This involved lots of different Chinese themed activities for us to try across all areas of provision in the classroom. We learnt a lot about Chinese New Year celebrations and Chinese culture. Each new year is named after an animal. There are 12 animals and we found out the story behind why each new year changes to a new animal.

We made; Chinese New Year cards, lucky red packets and Chinese lanterns. We used chopsticks to pick up noodles, wrote Chinese numbers and words in Chinese. 

We wrote wishes for the new year. Chinese people do this each year and attach their wishes to a 'Wishing Tree'. We attached ours to a Wishing Tree on our Chinese New Year Display.

We also made our own dragons. This involved us practising our fine motor skills. We carefully cut out the dragon's head and tail. We then folded two strips of paper very carefully to make a springy body. Finally we attached two straws so we could move the dragon and make it dance.

Have a look at our photo's 


Chinese New Year 1 on PhotoPeach


Chinese New Year 2 on PhotoPeach

During the week we all helped to make a large Chinese dragon head. We then watched videos of Chinese New Year lion and dragon dances and listened to music that they dance to. On Friday during our PE lesson we created our own Chinese New Year dragon dance. We took it in turns to make our own music to accompany the dance, make a dance using our mini dragons and to create a group dragon dance using the large dragon head. 

Here are the photo's

Chinese New Year Dragon Dance on PhotoPeach

To finish off our Chinese New Year themed week we tasted some Chinese food and drink. We had  cold green tea with noodles, prawn crackers and fortune cookies.

Chinese Food Tasting on PhotoPeach