This week we celebrated Chinese New Year and started off the week with some wonderful dragon dancing! We watched videos of the colourful Chinese dragons and how they move before re-creating the dance ourselves. The children used bells and drums to create an orchestra while others danced. We played 'loud', 'soft', 'fast', and 'slow' and the dragons changed their movements accordingly.
The topic of Chinese New Year informed our activities for the week and in Art we created a large dragon for our display board. The Chicks explored mark-making, using cotton wool buds and thin brushes to create wonderful and bright decorations to add to our display. The children studied the difference between the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters and we had fun re-creating these to display alongside our dragon.
The Yellow and Orange Chicks had a Chinese restaurant set up in their bubble and the children explored how to use chopsticks, whilst the Green Chicks were busy washing, ironing, sweeping and pegging in their launderette. Our role play areas provided a great stimulus to expand the children's vocabulary and we enjoyed having lots of conversations about the different types of food we had tried in Chinese restaurants.The Pink Chicks were busy collecting random acts of kindness in their kindness jar and we were very proud of them. At the end of the week the jar was full and the kindness fairy was pleased to take all the messages away. She left us some lovely stickers in return.
During Maths, the children had fun counting oranges and recognising the sets of one, two and three objects. Some worked on their counting skills and we also managed to explore some basic addition and subtraction whilst using the oranges. In Cookery, we made spring rolls and tasted lots of yummy fresh vegetables. The children used their fine motor skills to cut the vegetables into small pieces and we enjoyed discussing the different textures, colours and tastes of the different vegetables!
It has been very cold this week and the Chicks have had a lot of fun in the snow. In our Outdoor Learning Environment we were excited make lots of footprints and to explore the different patterns we could make in the snow. Our highlight was using the microscope to examine snowflakes and ice. We also explored how fast the ice melted when placed in the sunshine.
We are so glad that we managed to remain open for the first half of term and can’t believe how fast the last six weeks have flown by. On behalf of the Chicks team I would like to wish you a restful half term.
