The week commencing 05/02/24 Nursery were exploring their latest text within our expedition Once upon a Time – Who is hiding in the pages of this book? We were looking a comparison of the traditional tale of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, through a text titled “Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas” by Natasha Yim. This story is a celebration of oriental culture made accessible to children through a traditional tale. The Children really enjoyed learning about the differences between the bears in the story, Goldy Luck and Goldilocks and the Chinese culture overall, which made great links for the celebration of Chinese New Year.

Goldy Luck, Mr and Mrs Chen had rice porridge known as Congee in their adaptation of the story, so the children played and investigated rice in the sensory tray. They filled red containers and and practised picking up Pom poms with chop sticks building their fine motor skills in our finger gym.

We then researched Panda Bears by looking at non fiction texts in our Tuesday Reading Crew using the text “ A Book of Bears” by Katie Viggers. The children learned where Pandas come from, where they live, what they eat and what they look like. We used this information and other stimulus to produce beautiful artwork of Panda faces.

Children experimented with Chinese dining within our role play area, sitting on floor cushions and using tweezers and chop sticks to eat pretend noodles in their role play. Nursery also had a Chinese food tasting crew on Thoughtful Thursday, during which they tried a number of new foods including noodles, Sweet and Sour Sauce and Prawn Crackers. Most of the children liked the noodles 🍜 and had second helpings. Some of the words used to describe the sweet and sour sauce were “Spicy”, “Tingly”, “Sweet” and “Hot”.

Nursery explored traditional Chinese dress and took part in their own traditional street parade. The children split into two groups and played a range of instruments and took turns to march and dance, exploring various levels in pairs using Chinese dragons. What beautiful work they produced!

Throughout the week children created various paintings of a Chinese theme including dragons and lanterns as it is officially the year of the dragon, 2024. This got us thinking about the year of the children’s birth which was for most the year of the Rat or some the year of the Ox. We watched of short video/puppet show about the ancient myth of how the Chinese calendar came to exist and the order of the animals by year. The children took part in an online tutorial modelled by myself to draw a rat 🐀, representing the year of their birth. The results were awesome, we have some budding artists.