It is the time of year where the EYFS department has bloomed in to life with the array of red and gold red for Chinese New Year. All our Mandarin staff have been busy preparing our department to welcome in the year of the Ox and begin our celebration here in Early Years. It is wonderful to see the children marvel at the sight as they walk around the classrooms and corridors.
In EYFS the cultural part of education is extremely important, so all children grow up understanding diversity, culture, acceptance of others and become upstanding global citizens. Over the next few weeks all children from Pre-Nursery, Nursery and Reception have the opportunity to develop their knowledge of Chinese New Year; its meaning, importance and key aspects of the celebrations. We thank all our amazing Mandarin staff for emailing this to happen.
Please read below what has been happening across the EYFS phase this week:
Pre-Nursery
Pre-Nursery have been having fun learning all about baking and tea through the rhymes ‘Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake’ and ‘I’m a little teapot’. Using sensory exploration the children have had fun creating play dough cakes by rolling and pat dough. Then adding candles and beautiful ball decorations on top. Along with this they have used their sense of touch to explore the texture of flour , an ingredient used in a cake.
During carpet time we have had fun ticking off cake ingredients as Miss Isla role-played baking a cake and there has even been some renditions of ‘Happy birthday’ as we pretended to bake.
While dancing to ‘I’m a little teapot, Pre-Nursery all loved learning how to create a cup of tea using a lovely British breakfast teabag and were amazing at matching the different coloured tea cups to their saucers!
Nursery
Nursery have spent much time this week in pretend play, reflecting on aspects from our text, developing their language, social and emotional skills. The children have demonstrated a good understanding of story events and structure and have used classroom carpet time to share thoughts and feelings about the actions of Goldilocks.
The fantastical themes of traditional tales have sparked much interest from Nursery who have enjoyed learning new words and listening for new sounds in the words of our story. Following on from reading time, children have engaged in role play activities using props directly related to text to help solidify their understanding of new words and further develop language skills through interaction and questioning.
During the week children have shared their joy and excitement about preparations at home for Chinese New Year celebrations! We had a wonderful morning on Thursday creating our own Chinese tea house, collecting red objects to bring luck for the New Year and sharing greetings.
To encourage the children’s mathematical thinking and awareness, we have played with patterns this weeks and practiced recognising patterns of colour, shape or object. Nursery experimented with creating repeated patterns using coloured blocks. We had lots of fun chanting together to highlight and recognise elements of a pattern sequence using rhythm of speech and repetition. Many children developed skills this week that enable them to see regularity in pattern and predict how a pattern might continue!
Reception
This week the children have been comparing life at the time of the Dinosaurs to life now. We discussed how we knew so much about dinosaurs even though there were no computers or cameras or even people at the time dinosaurs lived!
We practised our subtraction skills, trying to figure out how many pieces of meat were left after the T Rex had eaten his lunch. We used our fingers and also tried counting back in our heads.
In phonics we learnt the sounds ‘y’ ‘z’ and ‘zz’ and also met Rodney the rhyming rat. We learnt that words that sounds the same rhyme and saw how by changing the first sound of words we can make many different rhyming words.
The children have continued to practise their Chinese New Year performance and it is sounding and looking great!
