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!!