Year 1 have ‘visited’ China this week. We have loved learning about how the Chinese celebrate their New Year and we have done lots of different activities and challenges this week linked to China. The children were fascinated by videos of Chinese New Year celebrations, in particular the dragon dancing.
A highlight of our week has definitely been food tasting. We started by breaking open fortune cookies and reading our fortune messages and then we enjoyed a banquet of different food, including rice, noodles, wontons, spring rolls, prawn crackers and prawn toast. The children developed their fine motor skills by using chopsticks and I was really impressed with the children’s willingness to try food that was new to them. The children also followed a Chinese custom by taking home red envelopes filled with treats.
The children have enjoyed practising speaking, reading and writing in Mandarin this week. We have learnt how to say Happy New Year in Mandarin Chinese and the children explored writing Chinese symbols. The children found another use for chopsticks too and have been using them to write Chinese symbols for numbers in sand and even writing their spelling words by painting their words using chopsticks!
We’ve also been very creative this week and the children have made Chinese drums using paper plates, Chinese lanterns and a Chinese dragon puppet. Some of the children have used our construction area to complete a challenge of building a Great Wall of China and thinking about how they would measure it. Ardderchog!
How fantastic! I know Grace is really enjoying this topic and the way that the Chinese table was set was amazing!