Chinese New Year!

What a busy time of year! This week our class learnt about two celebrations, Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day). As a part of the new Australian Curriculum, we are looking at all different celebrations throughout the year, it just so happens that two are in this week!

Over the weekend, I made a trip to China Town and got a few bits and pieces from the Chinese grocery shop for the New Year celebrations in our class... it was absolutely packed! China town is such a fun place to be this time of year, so much colour, so many decorations, such as festive atmosphere!

Anyway, back to my class :)....

I set up structured play sessions with a Chinese New Year focus...I took pics of the different stations, but I left my camera at school so I'll need to post them later :)

Here's an overview of the stations...

We rotated the stations over a couple of days, which seemed to work well. They had about 25ish minutes at each station, but with pack up and change over it took the whole afternoon! It was so gorgeous to watch the kids on the New Years Feast Station! They all sat around the table and cooked and served each other food, while trying to use the chop sticks to eat 'noodles' (cut pieces of thick cord). I was so impressed with their turn taking!

For Maths, we read the story about the the Chinese Zodiac by Gabrielle Wang and talked about the twelve animals of the Zodiac. We discovered that most of the class were born in the Year of the Rat, with a couple being born in the Year of the Pig (...and I was born in the Year of the Horse!)

The kids then all made pattern snakes to celebrate the Year of the Snake.

First we talked about patterns....

....and we made our snakes (most did a really great job of patterning - I was quite impressed!). They LOVED adding the googly eyes (I got these from Big W... so much cheaper than the ones in the school-supply catalogue!)

We also counted how long our snakes were, which was an eye opener... there a few kiddos who I'll need to work on their one-to-one number correlation and Trusting the Count - it's given me some ideas of what we need to focus on in the coming weeks!

Here's a copy of the snake heads and the writing card that went with it, if you'd like to use this with your class :)

I hope you had a lovely week with your classes... I'd love to hear of any Chinese New Year activities that you did :)