Chinese New Year continued

As Chinese New Year festivities go on for up to 15 days we thought we would share some more activities and ideas you could try at home.

Did you know exploring different traditions helps your child develop acceptance and cultural awareness?
Why not watch this clip to learn more about Chinese New Year? Before watching maybe ask your child what they already know about Chinese New Year? After watching find out what they have learnt about the celebration.

Chinese New Year cuisine is as varied, colourful and as exciting as everything else to do with the celebration.  If we were at nursery, we would take the opportunity for children to try different foods from China and expand their taste buds. There is lots of well-known examples available in the local supermarket that you can try. You could try lots of pick ‘n’ mix bowls with common Chinese food at home. Spring rolls, prawn crackers, rice, noodles, dumplings, sweet and sour chicken or tofu, as well as many other common dishes. Or you could opt for a healthy snack, an orange which symbolise wealth, apples are for peace and tangerines are for good fortune.

Our chart we shared yesterday displayed the Chinese alphabet. We hope you had fun finding letters from your name.

Today we are sharing a chart displaying Chinese numerals. Can you find your age? Or the number written on your front door?

Have fun discovering the Chinese numbers.

Chinese numbers 1-10

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Ruby’s Worry

This week our story of the week is “Ruby’s Worry” by  Tom Percival. Please click on the link below to access the story and some great ideas for learning experiences and opportunities for your child to open up about any worries they might have.

Be kind to yourself parents and carers, we know how tough it can be juggling life with young children and not always being able to spend quality time with them in your busy day. When you can, take 5 minutes and listen to a story together.

Ruby’s Worry final PDF (1)

Remember if you complete any of the tasks we would love to see your photos!

Chinese New Year

Good Morning everyone!

I hope you are having a good week! Maybe you made pancakes yesterday?  Some of you might have bought them from a shop!  Don’t worry if you didn’t have pancakes because we will be back in nursery very soon and I think we should have them for snack!

Pancake Tuesday is celebrated every February along with Chinese New Year. 

Chinese New Year was celebrated on the 12th February. For some people, it is a very important festival where families spend time time together. Celebrations can last more than two weeks!

Each year is represented by a different animal- the story of how this begun can be found here:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/chinese-new-year

Why don’t you find out what animal 2021 is represented by and find out what the animal was the year you were born? 

Here is the Chinese alphabet, can you see the start of your name?  Why don’t you try and copy it? Remember to show us because we would love to see it! 

Image result for a to z chinese alphabet

 

Pancake day

Good Morning ☺️

I hope you are all safe and well.


Today is Pancake Day 🥞

Whos making yummy pancakes today? Either for breakfast or lunch or after dinner? We would love to see your pancakes . I know at nursery when we make pancakes the boys and girls love to see the pancakes flip up in the air. 

 

Here is a simple recipe to make your own yummy pancakes to try at home.

 

Ingredients

Method

  • STEP 1                Put 100g plain flour, 2 large eggs, 300ml milk and 1 tbsp sunflower or vegetable oil into a bowl or large jug, then whisk to a smooth batter.
  • STEP 2

    Set your frying pan over a medium heat and carefully wipe it with some oiled kitchen paper.

  • STEP 3 

    When hot, cook your pancakes for 1 min on each side until golden, you can keep them warm in the oven whilst you cook more. 

  • STEP 4            Serve with your favourite topping.
    Do you like jam? Chocolate, strawberries? Syrup? Bananas? Butter?
    Let us know your favourite pancake topping. You can email some photos to your child’s keyworker.
     

Remember and stay really safe when frying your pancakes, use your good listening to adults and  stay back from the hot cooker and oven. And enjoy 🥞🥞 

Meditation

Happy Thursday everyone,

We hope that you found the zones of regulation chart a useful tool and are able to use it with your child at home. The chart lets children explore the different feelings they can experience on any day and helps them identify and name their emotions and feelings. 

Here are some more ideas and activities to help your child recognise and explore their feelings and emotions through drawing, writing, talking and listening. These are activities that help children build vocabulary and word recognition skills around topics that relate directly to their daily lives and experiences. 

All you need is a pen or pencil and some paper.

Ask your child “can you draw me a sad or a happy face?”  To make the activity more fun you could use a mirror and ask your child to look at their own face to decide if they look happy or sad. You could extend the activity by asking more questions such as do you feel happy? What sort of things make you feel happy? Can you make a happy face? What does our mouth and eyes do when we are happy? What noise might we make? What would ‘sad’ eyes look like? Can you make me a ‘sad face’? What makes you feel sad? 

We would love to see your pictures.

We often participate in meditation sessions at nursery to bring some calming energy and relaxation at the beginning or end of a busy day.

Meditation can help children read and respond to internal signals of stress before their developing brains and bodies give in to a full-blown tantrum. The key is intuiting what your child needs to come back into balance and giving him or her the tools to practice.

Meditative music and recorded meditations can have a profoundly calming effect on children. We have chosen 2 links to share with you. We hope you are able to take some time out to watch the meditation links along with your child.

Another useful resource attached is a copy of the ‘Play well pack’ produced by Play Scotland.

The pack has even more suggestions to support play at home and describes how important play is for children’s learning and wellbeing.

The pack is based around the SHANARI wellbeing indicators that we use to support wellbeing and ensure children develop and reach their full potential within the nursery.

PS0019-Play-ScotlandSTC-Partnership-Pack-Web

Aliens Love Underpants

Good morning everyone,

Hope you are all having a good week. This week our story of the week is Aliens Love Underpants by Claire Freedman.

I know you will all love this funny story and hope you enjoy the learning opportunities suggested. Remember to send any photographs of your learning or Tweet us at @NurseryLoanhead

 

Home Learning Doc 3

 

 

Happy Tuesday

Good morning 🙂

I hope you are all feeling good today.
During group time at nursery and throughout our nursery day we use our zones of regulations to help us open up and discuss how we are feeling.
This allows children to express their feelings and learn how to self regulate. We use the poster below to identify which zone we are in and discuss strategies that we can use to move zones. You can try using this at home with your child.
This allows children to achieve good self control and emotional regulation.

____________________________

The Big Garden Bird Watch.

Since we are spending a lot of time at home and outdoors we thought we could do a spot of bird watching as we know this is a huge interest and children love to watch out for what different birds we can spot out in our nursery garden.

We would love to hear about any birds you see in your garden at home or when out on local walks. You can email this to your child’s keyworker.

For more information please follow the link below to RSPB where you can submit your findings. You can also find more fun activities.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/get-involved/activities/birdwatch/everything-you-need-to-know-about-big-garden-birdwatch/#Resources

Happy Bird watching.