Chinese New Year

I am planning to spend two weeks enjoying all things Chinese for the second half of February! Here is my planning linked to the EYFS although many of the activities cover more than one area!

KUW

• Trip to a Chinese Supermarket in Birmingham to buy snacks, cooking utensils and decorations with the children. In the Chinese Quarter so should be nicely decorated for New Year - Risk Assess.
• Fly bio-degradeable Chinese sky lanterns in the early evening as it gets dark - available from poundshops - Risk Assess due to use of fire!
• Look at and talk about pictures of Chinese children in our Children of the world book - no link for this as it's a library cast-off (cost 20p and it's a huge hardback book with the most beautiful images in!)
• make Chinese rice-pudding

CD

• Make Chinese lanterns from paper.
• Make paper dragon puppets.
• Sensory play with cooked and raw noodles.
• Make a plum blossom tree.

PD

• Dragon dancing.
• Make New Year Dumplings - this recipe will call for rolling the dough into a big sausage, cutting it into rounds, rolling the rounds out into circles, spooning the filling then pinching the dumplings closed.  These are all skills that one or more of the childrena re interested in recently, and they are steamed so healthy too!  The recipe linked above tells sbout the symbolism of the dumpling!
• Playing with dried rice, spooning pouring etc.

CLL

• Spinning books for zodiac signs and Mandarin numbers.
• Traditional slat book made from peices of wood bound together, decoupage the slats with Chinese letters and symbols/pictures.
• Story of Chinese New Year.
• Count Your Way Through China.
• Lanterns and Firecrackers.
• We love Chinese New Year from the library.
• Memory book - I have used all of the above books to collect ideas to put in a memory book for the Continent draws, including a money envelope with chinese currency cut and pasted into word, printed then cut out.

PSRN

• Chinese bank notes (see above) for role play purchases!
• Mandarin numbers printed out, make matching games, link to English numbers, play snap etc.
• Tangram puzzles.
• Ordinal numbers using the order that the zodiac animals come in.

PSED

• Chinese dress ordered from e-bay.
• felt dumplings, felt fortune cookies, woollen noodles for role play.
• Sharing party food.
• Talking about experiences.
• Zodiac bookmarks to take home to parents.

As usual, I will be using these as resources to do with the children as and when they fit in with their interests and how the day is going.  I'm really looking forwards to the supermarket trip!!

Winter Olympics 2010

There is lots of information on the Official Website and various other sites if you have a look around.  There are some nice things here for older children, I will be using the skating boot dot-to-dot with my oldest as she LOVES skating at the minute!  These are nice too, to dot around and get the children used to the different sports that they will see!  It will be novel to have the TV on to watch things as it rarely gets turned on in our house during the week, I think the children will enjoy the sounds of the crowds jangling cow bells and cheering as well as the sports themselves. Here are a few of the ideas that I might use this week:

Knowledge and Understanding of the World

• Collect Newspaper clippings and pictures of both able-bodied and paralympic athletes, display them.
• Put a red dot on the world map over the location of the Olympics.
• The logo is based on an ancient symbol - build an Inukshuk from cardboard boxes or blocks – explain the meaning (pointed the way for the Inuit peoples of Canada).
• Watch coverage of the sports so that the children understand what they are.

Creative Development

• Make an Olympic Torch.
• Make dough/clay medals.
• Make an ice-skating rink for the small world figures to ice skate on, to promote imaginative play.
• Similarly build a bob-sleigh run with cut open toilet roll tubes!

Physical Development

• Mini Olympics – run with a balloon held between the knees.
• Two children together hold a balloon between their tummies and try to get across the room without it dropping.
• Sledging in a flat cardboard box with rope handle at the front to pull.
• Throwing Olympic rings over posts.
• Jumping from mat to mat (Olympic colours, saxan bath mats from Ikea!).

Communication, Language and Literacy

• O is for Olympics – what other things begin with O, could make a display or mini book.
• Talk about what you are seeing on the television.

Problem Solving Reasoning and Numeracy

• Shape of the circles.
• Counting them.
• Measuring out cooking ingredients to make butter tarts.
• Winter Olympics Bingo

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

• Make Olympic rings and explain what they stand for, they represent the five major land areas of the world; Africa, Asia, America, Europe and Australasia.  The rings are interlocked to show friendship.
• Make paper printables of the mascots; Miga, Quatchi and Sumi. Older children could design their own mascots, younger ones could colour some in.
• “With Glowing Hearts” is the motto, can the children think of their own motto?

 

 

February Planning.....

I am doing things a little differently in February, for three reasons:

1. I found planning a single day fun and inspiring when I did it for Australia day and I want to try that a few times for the start of the Winter Olympics and Pancake Day for example.
2. I have planned a lot to explore the two weeks of Chinese New Year and I don't want to overload either me or the children!!
3. I recently went to a training day that recommended planning observations to cover all areas of learning and development, and taking a systematic approach so I'm trying to bring that into my monthly planning in a meaningful way.

Therefore I will be exploring Social and Emotional Development over the next couple of weeks.  I will be looking reflectively at my setting to evaluate how I currently support children's social and emotional development and what I could introduce to improve this area of provision.  I will post about it as I go through the process!  I have downloaded Social and Emotional Aspects of Development from the National Strategies site and and will use it to help me evaluate and plan!

I will do a focussed narrative observation for around 15 minutes if possible on each of the little ones and evaluate it to see what I could do to support them in their development.

As usual I have some new books to introduce!! I Love You the Purplest is a beautiful book based on a mother and her sons, but this can easily be adapted to suit a childminder and her little ones!!  I will follow this book with an activity where we will write special things about each child on coloured hearts, such as things they are good at, things we love about them etc, we will put them up on the wall afterwards and read them every day!  The other book I have is called The Crayon Box That Talked and I will follow that up with an activity where the children draw pictures of different people on crayon shapes and then make them up into one big packet, for the little ones I will cut out pictures of children from magazines for them to glue on to the crayons..

I'm looking forwards to exploring Social and Emotional Development!