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EY 1 Matters
Chinese New Year is approaching, and we are enjoying learning about the festival, its traditions and cultural significance. We are using rhythm and music to practice traditional dances – the big drum makes a great sound – and the children all got involved, using coloured scarves and copying the moves Ms Kelly showed us. We learned about the 12 zodiac animals, and everyone got excited to re-enact the dragon dance. The children joined in to make a long dragon who flew around the nursery, dancing and breathing fire. Arts and crafts activities are always popular with the children and a perfect medium to support their holistic development. We are practising scissor control while cutting paper to make window decorations, learning about using tools safely and joining materials together while working with the hot glue gun, and developing language and communication skills, creativity and imagination while exploring media and materials.
EY 2 Matters
Phonics has continued with the letter ‘c’ and a review of previous sounds. The high involvement from the whole class is a testament to the hard work and dedication our children show and shows just how far they have come since the first day back in September. We have now started a new project based on construction. The children have begun to look at the process of building a tall structure and the many people involved from start to finish. This is a big subject, and there is much we will cover in this project, but at the beginning, we will try and keep it simple, and that’s why we chose the traditional story of the three pigs and three very different homes. This simple story is an excellent introduction to the benefits of planning and the correct use of building materials, and we will look into this more as time goes by.
EY 3 Matters
We have focused on storytelling during the English session, following on from this week’s book “The Idea Jar”, written by Adam Lehrhaupt and illustrated by Deb Pilutti. After creating our story jar through drawing and mark-making, we decided to try our hand at writing our own story. First, we drew a story map, with children taking out different ideas from our jar and adding them into the story. We all thought our collaborative story was fantastic, so fantastic that we cut it up into pieces. Ms Charley had accidentally washed away all the pages in a giant paper book, and she hoped that the class could take these pieces and use them as inspiration to fill the book back up with our fantastic idea story.
EY4 Matters
In English sessions, we have started to talk about the city of London. We began by learning some essential vocabulary: continent, country, city. The children quickly became familiar with this vocabulary and asked lots of questions such as “What is Xiaoshan?” and “What is Zheijiang?” This led to further conversations about provinces and districts. Once the children understood these terminologies, we discussed different continents, countries and cities that we knew. Lots of children were familiar with cities in China, and they were also able to name some countries from around the world. We looked at a world map and identified countries close to China, such as Japan and Mongolia. After this, we talked about England and, more specifically, the city of London. We compared the map of London and Hangzhou and began to spot some similarities. Both cities have a river running through them. After comparing the physical features of the cities on the map, we looked more specifically at London and the special or unique things to London. We looked at pictures that Miss Rose had taken when she lived in London and used these to generate questions that we wanted to know.
