International day/ Chinese New year!

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great half term holiday!

 We had a very full week of exciting games and activities before the break and I want to say a big thank you to all the parents for making such an effort to get involved with dressing the children up and bringing in food, etc. 

Everyone looked adorable and we had a fantastic spread of food for International day. I was so impressed and the class were really excited to try all the new and interesting  dishes!

 Here are a few of the pictures I forgot to add to last week's blog of the class making  some beautiful Valentine's crafts for Mummy and Daddy! 

So, we started our week of festivities with some chinese new year crafts...We talked about some Chinese traditions and made lucky red lanterns and gongs to scare away bad spirits!

                           

  The class enjoyed using chopsticks for our chineses tea party and we had a chance to try making some chinese dumplings and noodles!

We also began to learn about Native American life and culture. The class were fascinated by the idea of catching their own food and we talked about how important and respected nature and wildlife were to the tribes.We watched a traditional Cherokee eagle dance and made dream catchers to keep away bad dreams "like spiderwebs!" according to Ploen!

painting our dream catchers....

 next the tricky part!

   

 We looked at some different totem pole designs and talked about the different faces and animals we could see. Some of the class liked the idea of using animals to represent different skills they would like to have... some suggestions were "fast like a reindeer!" "strong like a dinosaur!" and "flying really high in the sky like an eagle"

 making our own totem poles....

We learnt that the Native Americans lived in homes which they built themselves and they had to cook their food on a big fire in front of their teepees. They had no electricity, which means.... no TV or computers  I'm not sure the class believed me about this :)

 Ploen built her own teepee condo, while Kana opted for a rocket!

 Some eagle dancing!


On Chinese New Year we all watched the dragon dance and everyone enjoyed the shows by the other year groups. We even braved the firecrackers without a tear!