Chinese New Year 2025

Preschool

In celebration of Chinese New Year, preschool took part in various activities! We started by reading a book all about the festival and how it is celebrated. The children learned about the Chinese dragon dance. They then made their own dragon using junk modelling. They cut, painted and stuck lots of different materials together to create the dragon’s head. The children used lots of different motor skills during this activity. Preschool then did some dragon dancing and played instruments to some traditional music. The celebration continued with tuff trays filled with rice, noodles and various vegetables, where the children made their own food and role-played having their own celebrations. They especially enjoyed dressing up in traditional clothing. The children even made their own decorations by writing lucky words in Chinese characters! We also discussed about the Chinese zodiac and how it started, the children also said it was the year of the snake! We retold the story using different props. One child said, “This is my favourite story!” Preschool loved learning all about the festival and all came in wearing red!

Toddlers

The toddlers took part in celebrating Chinese New year. For our first activity we hunted for gold coins hidden in red and yellow playdough. This was a lovely way for us to explore our fine motor movements. We then added some red and yellow materials to help mold the playdough to create coin pouches. For our next activity we then did some red and yellow mark making and collaging. We looked the Chinese flag and New Year calendar and created our own versions through sticking and making marks on paper. For our final activity we explored noodles with our Chinese tea set.

Babies

This Chinese New Year is the year of the snakes so we decided to create some snake prints to celebrate. The babies were able to use their hands or the paintbrushes to paint marks onto the bubble wrap before printing it onto their red paper to create the illusion of snake skin. We then used visuals to explore the lunar New Year calendar and loved pointing out the different animals that we could see.