Happy New Year! 新年快乐！We have had such a wonderful week learning about ‘Chinese New Year’ in our Pre-Nursery.
We have been learning about the traditional stories and the foods of Chinese New Year as well as making traditional art and crafts for Chinese New Year.
The stories that we focused on for this week are 'Chinese Zodiac-The Great Race’ and ‘Nian Monster’. We have talked about which animals participated in the Great Race and which animal reached the finishing line first. We also learnt about the three things that could scare the Nian Monster away: loud noises, fire and the colour of red.
We have focused on a variety of words through story reading and daily teaching sessions, such as Happy New Year, firework, lantern, red, Hong Bao (red envelope), dumpling, noodle, panda and the 12 different animals in the story of the Great Race: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
For art and crafts, the children practised their fine motor skills by using scissors and making their own Chinese lanterns as well as some beautiful fireworks. The children also enjoyed putting all the ingredients together to make some red playdough, and they were using rolling pins, chopsticks and other tools to make some traditional Chinese food with playdough such as noodles, dumplings and spring rolls.
For mathematics we also practised our fine motor skills by learning to hold chopsticks and using them to help us get the pompoms from one bowl to another to practise counting number. we also learnt to read and count the numbers in order from 1 to 5 using the Interactive White Board.
Our Pre-Nursery children also enjoyed singing and dancing to our favourite Chinese New Year songs such as: ‘Happy New Year’, ‘Xin Nian Hao’ and ‘GongXi GongXi’.
Next week we will continue the topic of 'Chinese New Year’ and we are looking forward to seeing everyone’s Chinese New Year dress up on Thursday!
By Echo Li
Pre-Nursery Jellyfish Class Teacher
