We started the year off by learning all about the season winter. We explored different materials such as ice, discussing the process of making ice and how it melts. The children also got to paint various sized pieces of ice, observing how it melted as they continued to paint it. We looked at the changes that were happening in our environment, such as frozen leaves, frosty grass and the fact that the trees no longer have leaves! The children investigated these with different resources such as binoculars and magnifying glasses. We also practiced our counting and number recognition with a snowball activity.
We have also been focusing on various fairy tales, including ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. The children have taken part in craft activities and different group time tasks focusing on building our vocabularies with learning new describing words, as well as retelling the stories from our memories.
We celebrated Chinese New Year! The children really enjoyed trying noodles and prawn crackers for snack. We’ve listened to traditional stories, made dragon masks and took part in dragon dances on the playground! We also learnt ‘hello’ in Chinese/Mandarin – Ni hao!
 We finished off the half term by celebrating Valentine’s day, focusing on what ‘love’ means to us. We had lots of meaningful conversations where the children told us who, and what they love. When asked what colour the children think love is, one child replied “love is all of the colours!” The children had the opportunity to take part in lots of sensory activities as well as making ‘perfume’ with flowers and coloured water.
