February 2019

Chinese New Year
We have had a busy couple of at weeks at preschool preparing and celebrating Chinese New Year. The children have enjoyed taking part in lots of craft activities, building a dragon for Dragon dancing, making pig masks to celebrate the year of the pig, making paper chain hand held dragons and exploring a sensory activity of noodles and chopsticks, practising how to hold the chopsticks in the correct way in order to pick up the noodles!
Our mat time song for the past week has been Happy New Year, in Chinese and all the preschool children have picked up the words really quickly and have enjoyed singing it each morning!
Gung Hay Fat Choy (In the tune Frere Jacque)
Gung Hay Fat Choy,
Gung Hay Fat Choy,
Gung, Hay, Hey,
Gung Hay, Hay,
Gung Hay Fat Choy,
Gung Hay Fat Choy,
Gung, hay, hay
 
Preschool have enjoyed learning and exploring The Chinese New Year story, gaining an understanding of how each animal became involved in the story and learning Makaton signs which supported us to tell our story.

We have also used our senses to explore Chinese food, creating a “yummy” stir fry to try at snack time. The children helped to prepare the stir fry, chopping up the different vegetables with adult support, smelling each of the different smells and using good describing words to describe what they could smell.
Once it had been cooked, each child was offered a small bowl of stir fry for snack. All off the children were willing to try the food and enjoyed learning how to use chop sticks to pick up their food “These are like little sticks, that you pinch together to eat”.  Our social snack time allowed us to listen to the different crunches the vegetables and prawn crackers were making and to answer any questions the children had in regards to Chinese New Year.

On Friday preschool took part in a Dragon dance holding the dragon they had created above their heads and walking around the room singing Gung Hey Fat Choy.
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What a lovely way to end the term!
We hope you all have a great week off and we look forwards to welcoming everyone back on Monday 25th February 2019.