The children in Reception have been learning about Chinese New Year celebrations. We read the Chinese Race story to help us understand the order of the Zodiac animals. We acted out the race on bikes and scooters in our outdoor area. The children used different materials to create the animals in the creative area and made rats, snakes, tigers and dragons. We used folding techniques and learned how we could join the head and tail to the dragon bodies using different tools. The children were keen to show our nursery staff their creations. The children practised writing and painting numbers in Chinese and learned how form the symbols for the zodiac animals. We used paper mache to cover balloons and decorated them with traditional colours and symbols to decorate our Chinese restaurant in our classsrooms. We used traditional lucky colours red and gold. We made our own fans and decorative dragons to copy a Chinese dragon dance with traditional music. We tasted traditional foods that would be used to celebrate Chinese New Year such as noodles. The children found them very tasty!
