Wednesday 10 February 2016

Chinese New Year

Today we joined Hazel class and Pippin class to celebrate Chinese New Year. 
There were lots of lovely things to choose from, including some adult directed activities - making spring rolls and Chinese drum making.

We used paper plates, lucky red circle paper, bells and wool and sticks for handles. We copied done Chinese writing onto the red circled paper. We added the handle and the bells and hey presto!




Mrs Harrison is a super chef and tells us how to make spring rolls. She then helps us to make some.






We enjoyed looking at and listening to stories in Mandarin.


We have enjoyed using small world animals to retell the story of the big race involving the animals which tells us how the Chinese New Year all began.


We used real rice and pretend noodles with chopsticks to find out how hard it is to pick them up!


We enjoyed making dragon masks, writing Happy Chinese New Year cards, writing in Chinese in the sand, playing with Bee bot and the Chinese cards and threading dragon cards.










We enjoyed sharing our spring rolls and other Chinese food back in class.





We've had a lovely morning celebrating! Dragon dancing tomorrow.....watch this space!

Tuesday 9 February 2016

Pancake day

Today we had great fun in finding out about pancake day. We learnt that it was also called Shrove Tuesday, that it always happens on a Tuesday and that it is the day before Lent begins. This led onto when Lent finishes and we had some excited children who started thinking about Easter. Sorry about that!!! I did emphasise that it's not for a long time yet!
We got together in groups with children from Sycamore and Hazel classes and began making our pancake mixture this morning.












We put the mixture in the fridge and then saved it to cook with later.

Mrs Harrison, our head chef, cooked pancakes for all the children ( and grown ups too!).

















And of course, we had pancake races!! This fits it with our maths focus on positional language this week. We awarded medals for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places!!