Kits News - February 4th 2022

The Kits have had a busy week celebrating and learning about the Lunar New Year. Our topic book was Peppa’s Chinese New Year and this offered a lovely introduction for the children to learn about the festival and its traditions.

We started the week by dancing to traditional music from East Asia and used scarves to accentuate our movements. We also looked at a traditional ‘Chinese Lion Mask’ and the children were excited to have a turn at wearing it. 

For our Art activity this week we decorated paper plates with gold and red paint, paper and glitter and combined them all together to make a big Chinese dragon! We also explored different types of writing as we looked at Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean script and tried to create our own symbols using black paint and thin brushes.

We went on to paint our symbols on red ‘Good Luck’ cards and made salt dough gold coins to go inside. The children loved making the salt dough coins and were involved in measuring and mixing the ingredients as well as rolling out and cutting the dough into circles. Making the coins developed the children’s fine motor skills as they rolled and squashed the dough and developed our Maths knowledge as we measured the ingredients and made circles of different sizes.

During Cookery we made delicious ‘special fried rice’. The children used plastic knives to cut the vegetables and scissors to snip the spring onions and mixed it all together to make a colourful rice salad. As we made the rice, we talked about different types of Asian food and the children were keen to tell us about their favourite dishes, with prawn crackers proving to a firm favourite amongst the group!

Our Role Play Area this week has been set up as a Chinese restaurant and the children have loved serving each other ‘noodles’, using cut up string and wool. They have also developed their hand strength and fine motor skills by learning how to use chopsticks as well as their literacy skills as they looked at the menus before deciding what to order.