Chinese New Year & Pancake Day!

The preschool children have had the opportunity to engage in many activities throughout the week to celebrate Chinese New Year. The children were admiring the Chinese New Year lanterns and dragon decorations when coming in to nursery and were very keen to paint many materials to help put together their own 3D dragon ready for the group dragon dance. The children have taken a large interest in the story ‘The Great River Race’ at group times, and have been very intrigued to find out which animal represented their year of birth. Some of the preschool children enjoyed a literacy activity, discussing and comparing how different the writing was for Happy New Year in English and in Chinese, with some children challenging themselves to copy the Chinese writing. In the home corner, a group of children enjoyed dressing up in traditional Chinese themed outfits as well as dressing up the dolls in the same clothes and sitting them at the table too, whilst others concentrated to use some chopsticks to attempt to pick up some noodles to aid their imaginative play. The children took part in food tasting at tea time, whilst listening to the calming effects of Chinese music playing in the background. 

The children have also been celebrating pancake day and as a part of the weekly cooking activity. A group of the children went on a visit to the local co-op to buy the pancake ingredients, before brining them back to the nursery for everyone to take part in a weighing activity and mixing the eggs in to the mix. The cracking of the eggs was very amusing for several children, laughing together at the anticipation of the eggs cracking. The children also enjoyed a play-dough pancake flipping game outside in the garden using small frying pans. They were so proud of themselves and each other each time they caught the pancake in the pan, cheering each other on as they took it in turns to watch each other. Another group of children chose to use the playdough in the mud kitchen, using the rolling pins to flatten out the dough and then collected some bark, mud and fallen leaves to decorate their pancakes with various toppings.