This week we have been learning all about Chinese New Year. We learned who celebrates CNY and how they prepare for it.  We learned about Dragon Dances and listened to and made Chinese music to go with the dances.

In PE we performed our own Dragon Dance along with the beat of a drum.  We covered ourselves in a long sheet and walked in a long line together just like the dancers.

We learned that red is an important lucky colour at CNY and made our own Chinese lanterns, decorated with Chinese symbols and gold glitter. They look great!

We also listened to the story of The Great Race and know that it is this story that explains why each year is named after an animal.  2024 is the year of the Dragon. We made our own dragon puppets, decorated lion and dragon heads and made ung pow envelopes, which the Chinese give as gifts at CNY with money inside.

We wrote about the story of The Great Race in our books; choosing a few sentences to write about our favourite parts.

This week in maths we explored odd and even numbers.  We got ourselves into twos and noticed that when 24 of us were here, there was no one left out.  When everyone is here (25) one person is left out.  Odd numbers always have one number left out and even numbers have twos.  We explored different numbers to find out if they were odd or even.  We also learned how to double a number.  Some children made the connection, that doubling a number always makes an even number.  We played with a magic doubling pot, where we put an amount of jewels in, waved the wand and double came out! We all tried to work out how many jewels would come out by using our own jewels on a 10 frame to practically explore this.

This week is Children Mental Health Week.  We took the time to enjoy lots of activities to acknowledge this.  The theme this year is ‘My voice matters’.  We looked at a video of different things from chocolate cake to swimming and eating lemons and told each other whether we liked these things or not.  The point being that we can all have different opinions, but each one matters.  We also learned the Makaton sign for ‘favourite’ and signed and talked about our favourite colours, foods, books, etc.  We played the Whisper Game and passes a message around a circle.  We had to listen to each other really carefully to get the message to stay the same – funnily enough, it did not!

In Monster Phonics this week we learned the ‘ai’ sound (as in rain).  We met Angry Red A and know that he makes this ‘ai’ sound. 

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you next week.