Buddies ~ chinese new year

***In September 2011 6 families got together and started Buddies Home School. Each week we meet in each other's home and follow a simple rhythm: movement and music, craft/ baking, snack time, free play and story time. Each part of the session is led by a different family. We are sharing this week's session with you here...***

This week at Buddies we celebrated the Chinese New Year. It is the year of the dragon. Zoe told us a little of what she knew about the story of the Chinese New Year and Roisine told us what she knew of the year of the dragon.

For our movement and music we did dragon dances. Flo had brought a dragon costume to take it in turns to dress up in.
We didn't have any Chinese music to dance to so we improvised with a bit of Reggae instead (there's nothing like a bit of Reggae to get you moving in my opinion!)

We danced all over the kitchen and ended our music and movement by calling the dragon to us. This involved choosing an instrument and banging/shaking it as hard as we could whilst roaring. I'm pretty sure every dragon that ever was heard us!

Zoe led our craft activity, we made these fantastic Chinese dragon puppets.
Each child got a card head and tail pre-cut out by Zoe.

They coloured these with wax crayons,
and decorated them with fiery strips of red and yellow crepe paper sprinkled with liberal amounts of glitter.


Then we made concertinas out of strips of red card and attached these between the head and the tail for the body. To finish we taped a straw to the head and one to the tail. They dance beautifully and the kids are very proud of them.

Our story this week was just gorgeous:

The story is of a little girl Lin who has a pet dragon. The illustrations are simple and beautiful but what is most special about it is that the author has incorporated Chinese characters into the story.
It was so much fun to look at these and notice how clever the shapes are and how beautiful.
The boys and I listening to the story

It was fun and we have lots more ideas for next year.

But for me the celebrations aren't over yet. It's Burns Night tonight...that's dinner sorted :-)
Happy Chinese New Year and Hoots Man tae aw ma wee Scottish pals :-)