Weekly Bulletin 29 January 2025

29th January 2025

Dear Parents

This week, and next, we are celebrating Chinese/Lunar New Year, which has just started.  This year is the year of the Snake and we are particularly lucky to have Dong, Katy and Hyun-Mi on our staff team helping us with their expertise. The children have been doing lots of fun activities from drawing Chinese characters to cooking noodles and enjoying dragon dances. We have also had some parents coming in to talk about this festival so a big thank you to them for sharing their time and expertise. Eleanor’s Mum from West Room came in to teach the children how to write a good luck symbol during Circle time.

Today Dong gave us a very special concert where she played her Guquin

for us all.

We guessed and then counted the number of strings on the Guquin and it came to 21.

The photos this week reflect some of our activities for Chinese New Year which have included making and decorating Chinese Lanterns, which is a great activity for children to develop fine motor skills as they have lots of practise using the scissors to snip the paper. Other activities have included looking at and writing the numerals 1-5 in Chinese script.

On Monday this week during circle times children heard the story of how the different years are represented by different animals, following a race across the river, and the decision that all the animals should be celebrated on a 12 yearly cycle.

In other news I am delighted to be able to tell you we have a new Parent Governor joining the team, she is Luke’s Mum from Nest Yellow, and her name is Amani Maihoub. Thank you to Christine O’Farrelly our outgoing parent governor for all her support during her term of office.

Looking forward to next week we have Louise Agarde, from the Local Authority Personal Social and Health Education service, coming to work with all the children across the Centre either on Wednesday 5^th or Thursday 6^th February. She comes with a real bus, which is a mobile classroom based in our carpark. She also brings her puppet friend Harold the Giraffe. Louise and Harold teach the children all about how to stay fit and healthy. Parents are also invited to come and drop in and visit the bus at 8.45-9.10am or 3.20-3.45pm on Wednesday 5^th February, so please do come along and have a look.

Children have been enjoying the opportunity to explore messy activities with shaving foam and mud both being favourites

Children in East Room had a lot of fun playing with shaving foam which is great for mark making and developing early writing skills as children are able to draw pictures, make patterns, start to write numerals or their own names in the foam.

Another messy fun activity is cooking in our garden ‘Mud Kitchen’.  This ‘Mud Kitchen’ garden area provides lots of opportunities to mix and stir different ingredients to make a soup or a cake.

Children in South Room have been looking at Chinese numerals written in shaving foam

Whilst West Room have been making special lanterns to hang on the branches of our tree

There is a chance to develop scissor skills by snipping along the folded edge of the lantern,

before carefully sticking the edges down ready for decoration

In the Nest children have been playing with red rice and learning to use chop sticks to eat noodles

Tuesday 11th February 2025 – Parents evening workshop on Communication, Language and Literacy 7.30pm-8.45pm – Please book your babysitter now so you can come along

Half Term holiday Monday 17^th – Friday 21^st February.  Holiday club will be running this week so please book your children in.