St George's Day Bunting and a Patriotic Muffin Tin Dinner!

I like to mark some national and multi-cultural festivals and celebrations with the children, but I like to keep it simple and make it meaningful to the children. I plan them all along similar lines - food, craft, story telling and celebrating. Keeping this format means that although the event may be from another culture, it is recognisable to even the youngest children as a special celebration to someone. It also makes it simpler for me to plan them as I know roughly what I am looking for and even if pushed for time, I can often pull them together at the drop of a hat - like I did this week for St George's Day! 

This was our lunch time meal - a Muffin Tin Dinner (MTD). I am proud of my creativity on this one with very limited fridge contents - I shall elaborate!!! From the top left there are carrots (for St George's charger of course!!), sticky rice horse shapes, spicy chorizo to represent the dragon's fire. On the bottom row from left to right there are bread shields (made using a heart shaped cutter then inverting the top to make the shield shape), these are covered with cream cheese and tomato slices to make the red cross. Next are boiled eggs painted as the English flag and lastly - red jelly - it has become customary to have red jelly in our MTD's!! Thanks Mum for the proper muffin tins to put them in!! Here are some more MTD's we've enjoyed.

We also made some very simple paper bunting using red paint on the edge of a piece of folded cardboard, that I cut into triangle shapes and threaded onto wool to hang up. Whilst we ate lunch under our bunting, I read to them two poems that tell the story of St George, which they found very entertaining - we had the paper mache castle and the happy land people out after lunch to play out the story!