Squirrels News - February 4th 2022
The Squirrels had a wonderful time celebrating Luna New Year this week. To help with their understanding of the annual celebration we looked at the book 'The Great Race.'
The children loved reading the book and cheering on all the animals as they crossed the river. This was a brilliant book to help teach the children how and why each of the animals came to have a year named after them. It also helped explain that the order we celebrate each year in was the order the animals finished the race. We learnt that this year will be the Year of the Tiger and we also had lots of fun working out which animal was the year we were born in.
In Numeracy we consolidated our knowledge and understanding of The Great Race by sequencing the animals in order of where they finished in the race. The Squirrels did brilliantly, making sure to look carefully to match up the animal with the correct corresponding number. We continued our focus on the Lunar New year in our Literacy Focus Time where we looked at different types of Chinese text. We learned which text matched up with which Luna animal and then attempted to trace and copy the text ourselves!
On our community walk this week we looked out for signs of the Luna New Year in our immediate environment and thought about the similarities and differences between how people celebrate Luna New Year and other New Years. We noticed that on both New Years’ people celebrate with fireworks and seeing family, but we also spoke about the different foods people eat to celebrate.
This conversation around food continued in the classroom where the Squirrels cooked up a storm in the Chinese restaurant which was set up in the Role Play Area. They worked as a team to manage all the orders flying in and cooked lots of delicious meals for their friends and teachers to enjoy.
On our Outdoor Learning Day this week we went on a CVC/rainbow word hunt and used the words we found to create a story.The children took up the challenge and tried extremely hard to think of creative ways to continue the story with their word. This was the first time we had done this as a group and it worked extremely well, with the Squirrels demonstrating excellent listening and comprehension skills and wonderful imagination!