This week in preschool the children have enjoyed learning about the hindu festival Navratri. The children first learnt how to do garba dancing and enjoyed dancing with sticks and wearing colourful scarfs around their bodies. The children enjoyed dancing in the garden with the sticks and enjoyed listening and moving their bodies to Indian music. The children then did some Navratri art where they used colourful tissue paper and glue to help them make their own Navratri art. The children enjoyed using their fine motor skills to glue the colourful squares onto their paper to create lovely art. To finish off celebrating Navratri the children enjoyed their cooking session with Nabeelah in where they learnt how to make pani puri. The children firstly chopped up the potatoes and onions into cube shapes and then placed this into the pan. The children then enjoyed using the spoon to sprinkle some chickpeas into the pan and then enjoyed sprinkling some cumin powder into the pan. We then mixed all of these ingredients together to make our filling. The children then watched through the microwave how the pani puri shells puff up. The children saw it going in flat and then coming out puffed up. One child said “this is magic”. We then poked holes into the middle to fill our filling into and enjoyed this for our snack. A few children said “this is so yummy”.

Well done preschool for learning about the Hindu festival Navratri.

To celebrate Navratri in the toddler room we learned and explored about how colour is used through this celebration. To do this we had celebration dancing with colourful scarves using our movements to create patterns. This was a lovely way to express our feelings and emotions through our movements and explore cultural music. To extend this we then got creative and made some firework prints as the end of Navratri is usually celebrated with fire works. We were able to explore patterns and colour mixing as we played and explored.