Chinese New Year in Preschool

Today is a special day, not only because it is the first day of the Chinese New Year, it is also Sonya's Special Day in preschool. Each child in Sonya's preschool gets a special day where his / her parents can do an activity with all the children in the preschool. When Erin said that special days start on 26th January, I quickly grabbed the opportunity to have Sonya's special day on the first day of the Chinese New Year. It gives me a great opportunity to explain and show Sonya some of the things associated with the Chinese New Year. I thought that she would remember it better if she did it with all her friends.

First, I got the kids to use their fingers to "paint" cherry blossoms on coffee filters. Some of the kids were a little hesitant about dipping their fingers into the paint so the teachers thought of using Q-tips instead which worked great.

Besides the painting, the teachers set up other activities as usual for the children to do. There were play foam and tangram.

The children also got some papers where they drew shapes and then cut the shapes out with scissors.

Sonya went a step further and painted her heart-shape paper.

I also brought all the asian costumes that we have in our house to the preschool so that the children can play dress-up. Some of the kids, especially Nassi, really enjoyed trying on all the different costumes.

After that, it was story time with Justin. I borrowed a book titled "The Dancing Dragon" from the Cambridge Public Library and Justin read it to the kids with Sonya as his assistant.

After the story, we shared the tradition of hongbaos and exchanging mandarin oranges. I prepared a hongbao (with "gold coins" which are really just chocolates) and two oranges for each child. Sonya had the opportunity to practice her "Xin Nian Kuai Le" as she gave out the hongbaos and oranges to her friends.

The children later exchanged oranges among themselves just for fun :)

It was snack after that and there were bagels, apples and juice for everyone!

The class was also embarking on a special project this week. They were going to build their own rocket ship. It was hard to get anything done with 17 kids together so Carla selected 4 children everyday to work on the project while the other children did other activities. Sonya, Eva, Francesca and Davis worked on the project today.

They started with a huge empty box which Carla sliced open to become a huge sheet of cardboard.

The children lie down on the cardboard and used their bodies to measure the board :)

Then each child got to help draw the guidelines to fold the cardboard.

Meanwhile, the other kids were engaged in other activities.

End of rocket ship building for the day and everyone played.

The bathroom at preschool is now Clara's favority place. I guess it is just so much fun to have all the regular things in the bathroom at child size. She can reach the tap without a step stool and play with all the bubbles in the sink.

It was another really nice day and one that Sonya will no doubt talk about for a long long time :)