Throwback - Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is very early this year, meaning that we have an extremely short half-term (3 weeks!) followed by a rather long 7 weeks until Easter. Still the Year of the Rooster will be properly celebrated with some old favourites and new ideas (adapted to my slightly younger age-group). To kick-start your ideas here is a throwback post to last year...

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Original post - 5th February 2016

A CNY-themed Five for Friday link-up today. Why not head over to DoodleBugs and see what everyone else has been up to this week?

1

Chinese New Year is a big big deal where I currently teach and the school is having a CNY rotation of activities organised by the parents, so I am actually scaling back what I would normally do so as not to take away from their efforts.

My posts from previous years about CNY ideas can be found:
here
and here

I also have a freebie on offer here.

2

I needed a really simple card as with a really tight timetable, unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything overly complicated. This year is the year of the monkey, so I adapted an idea from Adele Jeunette.

3

We made a wishing tree display as a writing focus, using the sentence starter 'I wish' to encourage some use of the recently learnt digraphs! Chinese people have orange trees for luck and prosperity and sometimes write wishes on them. There were some incredibly aspirational wishes ("I wish for diamonds"... please share with your teacher if you find some!) but also some very thoughtful ones.

4

My teaching assistant is a whiz at creative activities and she helped the children to make these beautiful blown ink and finger painted cherry blossom pictures.

5

Chinese New Year wouldn't be complete without plenty of themed books to share with the children. Click on the books for the links to Amazon.