Monday, 3 February 2014

Our Chinese New Year activities and Beavers badge

The Chinese New Year celebrations in Newcastle are on Sunday so we started some activities today in the lead up to this.

We made a visit to a large Chinese supermarket to buy snacks for our group session tomorrow, which will be Chinese New Year themed. This is near to Newcastle's Chinatown and we noticed that the signpost was also written in Chinese.


As well as snacks, we came home with these paper dragons on sticks which have been very popular this afternoon. We read the story of Nian the monster in our Chinese New Year library book and here and watched Blue Peter from last week together, which had a Chinese New Year feature.

We then did lots of role play with one person being the dragon monster and the others being the villagers who had to bang loudly and wave red banners to scare the monster away. My voice was quite hoarse afterwards! I think Harry and Peter would have carried this on all afternoon.


We looked at the Chinese flag online then created our own using a variety of red materials. I cut out stars from glittery gold card. We will use these tomorrow to stimulate some discussion about China at our group session.



Harry also wanted to make some red banners to put up at the window to scare monsters away. He painted a large sheet of paper from a roll, which is drying and can be hung tomorrow.


As well as a Chinese New Year book from the library, we have been reading We're Riding on a Caravan. This is based on a journey along the Silk Road to sell and trade at markets. We enjoyed this book, as with most Barefoot Books which combine great topics with beautiful, artistic illustration. We looked in the atlas afterwards to identify the yellow river.


Harry has also practised his cello today and done a Reading Eggs lesson. He came home from Beavers with his first badge, the science badge and he was absolutely delighted! He was really excited about the activity they had done too. They had gone outside to light some Chinese Lanterns and watch them float into the sky!


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