Chinese New Year

This week Class R have been learning all about Chinese New Year.  We have learnt about the Chinese Zodiac and read the story of how all the animals had a swimming race to decide who the new year would be named after.  We know that this year is the year of the tiger and that some of us were born in the year of the monkey (2004) and some of us were born in the year of the rooster (2005).  We made chinese lanterns and dragon puppets, dressed up in chinese outfits and played in our role-play area which was a chinese restaurant this week.  Our favourite thing was tasting chinese food.  Mrs Wincott made us a stir fry and we had lots of fun trying to eat it with chopsticks.  We also tasted prawn crackers, curry sauce and sweet and sour sauce. Yum! 

We need your knickers!

This is a plea for any spare children's knickers, pants, socks and tights that you may have at home.  Unfortunately we have run out of these items of clothing and are now really struggling to find anything to change the children into if they wet themselves or get wet and muddy playing outside.  We would also be grateful if you could return any of school's clothes that you may have at home.

Many Thanks

We've been baking!

This week we've finished off our dinosaur topic by baking dinosaur biscuits.  We worked in small groups and all helped to add and mix the ingredients, roll out the dough, cut out dinosaur shapes and decorate the biscuits.  Everybody around school said how nice they smelt!  Here is the recipe in case any of you would like to make the biscuits at home.

Dinosaur Biscuits

What you need:

• 
  
  100g margarine
• 
  
  100g caster sugar
• 
  
  200g flour
• 
  
  1 egg
• 
  
  half teaspoon salt
• 
  
  200g icing sugar
• 
  
  yellow or green food colouring
• 
  
  hot water
• currants or shiny silver balls for eyes

What you need to do:

1. Heat the oven to 180C.
2. Cream margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy.
3. Beat the egg into the creamed mixture.
4. Fold in the flour and salt.
5. On a lightly foured surface, knead the biscuit dough and roll our to approx 5mm to 1cm thick.
6. Cut into dinosaur shapes using biscuit cutters or dinosaur pictures as templates to cut around.
7. Place on a greased baking tray and bake for 15 to 20 mins.
8. Leave to cool on the tray for 5 mins before transferring to a cooling rack.
9. Mix together icing sugar with a few drops of food colouring and a little hot water to a smooth paste.
10. Decorate your biscuits with the icing.
11. Add currants/silver balls for eyes.
12. Enjoy your biscuits together!

We need your help!

NOTICE

Our topic next half term is food and we need things for our role-play area. Could you please send in any of the following?

Chinese Restaurant – menus, empty packets or empty boxes of Chinese food, chopsticks.

Café – any café menus, empty packets or boxes.

Ice-cream Parlour – any ice-cream scoops, empty ice-cream cartons.

Fruit and Veg shop – empty packets or empty boxes of dried fruit or anything else you can think of that might be of use.

Thank you.

Our visit to the temple

Class R went on a really interesting visit to the Balaji Temple in Dudley yesterday.  The first thing we saw were two huge concrete elephants outside the main doors.  They were amazing!  We were met by our guide, a lovely Hindu gentleman called Abhi Ji.  We had to take our shoes off as a sign of respect and then we were shown around the temple.  The temple is beautiful. It has lovely marble floors and lots of ornate carvings and beautiful flowers everywhere you look. We were shown around several different shrines.  Each one had a different god inside.  Our favourite was Lord Hanuman who is the monkey god.  We heard special bells ringing which signalled when the curtains were going to open to each of the shrines and we watched the priests as they carried out their rituals in each shrine.  We watched Abhi Ji take some holy water and food from the priests and some of us had some too.  Before we went home we were given fruit, biscuits and a drink and the grown-ups had some special rice to taste.  Everyone at the temple was really friendly and welcoming towards us.  Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos inside the temple but if you click on the link below you will be directed to their homepage and be able to see some pictures there.

Balaji Temple website