Unicorn Class Blog                     Term 3 Week 3                         Week Commencing 20th January 2025

This week we have been learning about Lunar New Year, which is a celebration marking the start of a new year on the Lunisolar calendar. As part of this we used our careful cutting skills to make lanterns to decorate our classroom. We also made snakes because each Lunar New Year is associated with a different animal from the Chinese Zodiac Cycle and this year is the year of the snake. We enjoyed trying prawn crackers and used the salt dough to make prawn crackers, dumplings and noodles, the noodles ended up changing to be wriggly worms and some of the dumplings ended up being snowmen. The home corner has been popular with delicious feasts being made, books being shared and looking after the babies.

We started to make a blossom tree for Lunar New Year to decorate our home corner by twisting newspaper, taping it and then painting it. We will make and add some blossoms to our tree next week.

Outside we enjoyed pretending that the playground was a river, we were animals and racing like in the Chinese Zodiac story ‘The Great Race’. We have also enjoyed making boats and rafts and testing them out in the puddles in the garden.

During Forest School we loved climbing, making dens, using the mud kitchen, collecting sticks to make a fire, finding different ways to transport water and looking for bugs.

During our time in the hall we played the traffic light game whilst moving around like different animals. We then did an obstacle course travelling on top of, under and over gym equipment. Lastly we played ‘Duck, Duck Goose!’ before putting our socks and shoes back on. Zoe and Mrs Fenwick have been very impressed with us doing this because we kept trying until we did it, even when we found it tricky.

During maths we enjoyed subitising with snowballs. Singing number songs including doing our body parts action number song, to help us say numbers in the correct order and count. We have also been ordering and counting the animals from ‘The Great Race’. 

During phonics this week we have been learning our Alphabet chant, using letter names and sounds on alternate days. This week we have been learning the letters ‘s’ (The snake slides and slithers) and ‘a’ (Alphie asks for apples). The patter we use when writing the grapheme ‘s’ is ‘Left around, right around, from head to tail’ and the patter we use for writing the grapheme ‘a’ is ‘Around the apple and down the leaf.’ There has been great excitement at practising these Letters, using our magic fingers in the air, clipboards, paper and pencils and using the whiteboards and pens. We have also enjoyed going on a letter hunt.

The magnetic shapes, marble run and painting have been very popular again this week. 

Next week we will continue to do activities around Lunar New Year including making a dragon's head, making instruments and experiencing doing our own dragon dancing.

Hope you are having a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you all next week for more exploring.

Best wishes

Mrs Fenwick