Dear Families,

What a vibrant red week, red considered to be a lucky colour in the Chinese culture. Our Chinese New Year topic has got off to a great start! We learnt about the preparation involved leading up to Chinese New Year and what kind of celebrations will happen for Chinese New Year. Some of us made lanterns while others practised Chinese symbols and painted Chinese dragons. This year, Chinese New Year falls on February 10th and it is Year of the Dragon. Thank-you to those of you who have shared your amazing resources and photographs relating to Chinese New Year and China. They have really helped in the children's growing understanding of different cultures, different celebrations and different countries.

Next week we will be looking at where China is and doing some simple map-making. We will also read The Great Race and learn about how the twelve animals earned their place in the Chinese Zodiac. Perhaps you can read a version of this at home and find out what animal your child birth year is in!

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Best wishes from the Nursery Team

Exploring Chinese artefacts and special items shared with us by Adesola's mum

Chinese noodles

We have been strengthening our hand muscles and practising control by carefully and slowly rolling thin, long noodles and putting them in our bowls with chopsticks. All or these things will help us so much to improve our pencil grip and writing skills.

Painting dragons

This week, we have been practising wavy lines and zig-zags for our pre-writing skills. We thought we would use these to draw Chinese dragons, and also paint them all on our own! Do you like them? We will work on them more next week.

Writing Chinese characters (Hànzì)

So tricky but we did so well! We looked at straight lines and shapes to get us started with copying some Hànzì.

Prepare: we talked about preparing the house for Chinese New Year. 

In the Chinese tradition, a big clean is an important part or preparing for Chinese New Year to "sweep" away bad luck and negative energy. We really loved using all of the cleaning equipment in the home corner!

P.E.

This week PE, we practised balancing a beanbag on various parts of our bodies while "travelling" across the hall. 

The Kindness Award

Congratulations to Elena and Elisa for achieving the Kindness Award this week! Elena has shown wonderful kindness to one of our newer children helping her understand Nursery routines and teaching her new English words. Elisa has shown kindness and patience towards a little boy who has recently befriended her and loves to share time with her. Well-done, you two!

Our Maths Words

This week, we have been learning all about WEIGHT and more specifically, learning to use the vocabulary, heavy and light, and then heavier and lighter, heaviest and lightest. Our children are always very quick to learn the word HEAVY but the word LIGHT is a tricky one and we need LOTS of practise to remember this word and how to use it.  

Our shape of the week

The Chinese flag has stars on it. How many are there? Are they all the same? How are they arranged? What shape is the flag?

Our number of the week is 1.

We are working towards every child gaining an in-depth understanding of all number to 5 by the time they leave Nursery. 1 might seem too easy but there is a lot more involved than we, at first, might think. It is not just counting 1, showing number fingers for 1 and recognising number 1 that we are learning in Nursery. We are also working towards learning:

• Understanding each object or mark represents 1. That, essentially, a group of objects are made up of lots of 1s. Also being able to touch each object once and only counting once when counting groups of objects

• Adding 1 more to a group of objects and working the total out in our heads mentally (by counting forwards by one more) or by recounting all the objects to find out what the total is after adding this one. You could ask your child the question "What is 1 more?" What is we added 1 and then another 1 and then another 1? (1 + 1 + 1) We would then be adding 3!

• Taking away (subtracting) 1 from a group of objects and working the total out in our heads mentally (by counting backwards by one) or by recounting all the objects to find out what the total is after subtracting 1. You could ask your child the question "What is 1 less?" and also introduce the word fewer.

We constantly encourage our children to explain  their mathematical reasoning with mathematical language, and to come up with their own solutions to mathematical problems before showing them.