Chinese New Year celebrations

This week it was Chinese New Year so we decided to celebrate! We all wore something red. A few of us found some amazing Chinese outfits! 

We tried our hand at writing some Chinese symbols. Using gold paint and brushes we concentrated hard and made some beautiful words. We wrote "prosperity", "sun", "mountain", "love" "moon" and "banana"!

We also had some stories and made Chinese dragons and for lunch we made noodles and practiced using chopsticks. This was harder than it looked! After lunch we tried some new fruits, lychees and Chinese pears.

Happy Chinese New Year!

                        

Paper snowflakes and conker webs

For our last meeting in November, we made lots of paper snowflakes, and some "conker webs" ( see tutorials here, here & here).

To make a conker web, you need a dry conker, in which you make several holes around with a sharp needle, and then push in some cocktail sticks. 

Then you take a piece of wool and wrap it around the sticks, going round and round until you feel like changing colour. It's very easy and gives lovely results.

The children also enjoyed playing with bricks, listening to a very lively rendition of "We're going on a bear hunt" and helping with the sweeping.

Learning about Thanksgiving

This week we had an American theme, we learnt about Thanksgiving and made lunch together.
We made little paper boats and on the sails we wrote something that the children said they were thankful for - which went from "making gingerbread men yesterday" to "seeing my friends"!
We then made pizzas together. We each brought our own bases, and covered them with various ingredients, and of course cooked them and ate them!
Michelle also read a book with some of the children and talked about the origins of Thanksgiving in America.
After lunch we had another great walk around the beautiful grounds of Fyne Court.