What a spectacular week we have had in the forest this week celebrating the Lunar New year, the year of the Snake.
Fruit tasting, Chinese calligraphy, lion dances and red lantern creations have fuelled our imagination and curiosity. Spiral snakes were enthusiastically designed and created by decorating paper plates and then cutting into the plate along a spiral path, after which we hung up our snakes to decorate our space.
We have been rolling out our lovely smooth grey clay to create even more snakes and squishing balls of clay to create mooncakes, all the time talking about the names of the Chinese years and which year we were each born in. We have made snake masks as well practising our colouring-in skills and cutting skills.
We’ve played traditional Chinese music and danced around with a dragon head on, all of the children holding onto each other forming the body of the dragon. We have used our own musical instruments to create our own celebratory music and enjoyed counting the rhythm and beating our logs and drums during our Chinese New year parade.
One day our lunchtime was held around our fire pit as we learnt about fire safety and we warmed our toes and ate our stew. We sang a few fire songs like “London’s burning” and “5 little firefighters standing in a row.”
Our favourite Chinese New Year Stories have included “Winnie the Witch and the Chinese New Year” by Valerie Thomas, “The Run Away Wok” by Ying Chang Compestine, “The Great Race” by Dawn Casey and “Busy Chinese New Year” a Campbell book.
Thanks for coming to the forest, see you all next time!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham