Blog 9.2.24
This week we celebrated Lunar New Year. We continued with Julia Donaldson stories and used her book ‘The Magic Paintbrush’ as our focus. The story is a traditional Chinese tale about a girl called Shen, with her magic paintbrush she can paint steaming pots full of fish and oysters to feed the hungry people in her village, but when the evil emperor hears of her gift, he commands Shen to paint gold for him instead. She is determined to keep her promise to paint only for the poor and she cleverly outwits the emperor.
Our Rainbow Challenges this week have been related to this story and Lunar New Year:
Writing – Nursery: Write about the story and tell an adult what your writing says Reception: Write about the story and use the sounds that you know in your writing.
Maths – Nursery: Fill the dragon with Numicon Reception: Fill the dragon with Numicon and count how many pieces you used
Funky Fingers – Nursery: Fill the dragon with buttons Reception: Use the tweezers to fill the dragon with buttons
Creative – Nursery: Create a stripy dragon Reception: Create a stripy dragon using three colours in a repeating pattern
Playdough– Nursery: Make some playdough doodles Reception: Make some playdough noodles and copy the word ‘noodles’ in Chinese
Drawing – Follow the instructions to draw a dragon
Cooking – Nursery: Help make some dragon biscuits Reception: Help make some dragon biscuits and write about how you made them
Most of the Reception children completed all their challenges. Well done!
In maths this week the Reception children have been find ways of making different numbers up to ten. The Nursery children have been learning about number five.
This week in Read, Write Inc. the Reception children have been practising sounds they have previously been taught and using them to write longer words and sentences. The nursery children have been playing lots of different listening games and some children have been playing rhyming and initial sound games.
This week we have been learning about Lunar New Year. In our music theme of ‘Action Songs’ we have been learning a Chinese song ‘Kong Hei Fatt Choy’ we put actions to the song. Every year in Lunar New Year it is the turn of a different animal. We heard the story and found out that this year it is the year of the dragon. The Reception children wrote about the story. In the story ‘The Magic Paintbrush’ Shen paints a bowl of golden rice, we measured some water to make our own golden rice and then used chopsticks to eat it. We also made some special dragon biscuits and each had some fortune cookies.
Our RE theme is ‘Which places are special and why?’. This week we found out about a vihara which is a special place for Buddhists. Benji’s mum came in to talk to us about it. She also brought in some special items that Buddhists use for us to look at. We have all enjoyed exploring the vihara in our class this week.
Our Starfish star of the week was Elen for working extra hard this week with her writing. Well done Elen!
Next week it will our last week of our Julia Donaldson ‘Tell me a tale…..’ theme. We will be reading lots of our favourite Julia Donaldson books during the week.