6 replies to this topic

[Nicola Gray]

Dear All,
Am also planning for next term - January we will be covering All about me and February we will be doing Chinese New Year - quite good timing as we are being Ofstedded that month too!! Always seem to drag up the same old thing - but then if it ain't broke don't fix it. Sort of things that we do are:-

All about me
People/family collages with cut outs from magazines
My family pictures
My eye, skin and hair colour charts

Any themes/ideas you can think of which I could run over the whole month would be most appreciated

Chinese New Year
Read the story and act out with the pretend animals crossing the river
Chinese Lanterns
Luck red purses with gold chocolate coins
cooking chow mein and eating with chopsticks
Chinese flag

Any other ideas for cooking would be great along with other ideas

Would like to get as much feedback as possbile so can have everything prepared in advance - well that's the theory anyway

Many thanks
Nikki

[mundia]

Hi Nicola, you seem already well organised. Ive never done Chinese New Year so Im not full of ideas there. We are doing 'Bears' next term, probably concentrating on Brown Bear, and Going on a Bear Hunt, but there's loads of other stories that would fit which is why we chose it.
We have covered myself this term and have done wuite a lot on friends and 'doing things together' (like paired writing, painting, games etc). We have also covered Celebration as part of the 'my family' part of the topic.

[Harricroft]

We're doing 'Food' as a topic for the January/February half term and will be including Chinese New Year as part of this. We plan to turn our role play area from a cafe into a Chinese Restaurant - lots of literacy/numeracy opportunities here - writing menus/bills/receipts/paying bills etc. I'll ask parents to send in take-away menus, Chinese calendars etc. I'm planning on taking in examples of Chinese writing and letting children have a go at their own Chinese style writing. I'll get a wok for the restaurant. We'll make our own play food - though you can probably buy some - the children will enjoy making their own - rice, barley, lentils with pva to make egg fried rice, brown tissue paper wrapped round cotton wool to make meatballs. We'll also be sampling lots of Chinese foods.

How about making pink blossom trees using twigs and pink tissue paper screwed up for blossoms. It's supposed to be lucky if the pink blossom is in flower when it's Chinese New Year - I'd need to check this, I have it in a file somewhere if you want more.

Don't forget things like cleaning the house and settling debts. The importance of elders. Do you know the story of the Kitchen god and making sure he only reports good things?

I haven't got my file to hand, but if I can be of any more help, let me know.

Harricroft.

[Nicola Gray]

Thanks for that - I like the idea of making egg fried rice with the pva glue and the story behind the blossom tree will be a good one. thanks very much
Nikki

[Lisam]

Chinese New Year starts on January 22. Our local Chinese restaurant has been giving out chinese calendars for next year, they're great. www.chineseparade.com has loads of ideas.

[Linda McDowell]

Are you doing senses? One idea for smell is to add oils to paint and have the children do observational paintings-apple, peach, and strawberry are good ones. Or just paint fruity pictures!
Linda

[sklenar]

We made family trees which showed how different each family was. The children drew a face for each member of their family ,the parents gave us a list of pet names for grandparents. stepfathers etc. The children put their family faces onto a paper tree. So we had a forest of how different family make ups are. I then followed this up with well known stories that did and did not have the sterotype family. They also gained symetry of the face, pairs of things, eye and hair colours and the senses.
Taste salted or sugared porridge Goldilocks and the 3 bears
touch straw, wood, brick Three little pigs

I'm sure you get the picture, I had'nt planned for this but I found it was an excellent spin off and great for partenership with parents.

On the Theme of Chinese new year we made a dragon and made up a dragon dance. The owner of the take-away came ane taught us all to saY "happy new year" in chinese as well as lots of samples to taste prawn crackers, noodles, spring rolls, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots.
The roleplay area was turned into a resturant and we made play food etc

Sklenar