At nursery we did lots of playing and learning about how Chinese people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year.

We learned that Chinese New Year is an important festival in the Chinese calendar, sometimes called Spring Festival and that this year in the year of the Rooster.

It is very important for our young children to learn and understand about the different ways in which other people and other cultures celebrate. Learning such as this raises the children's awareness and acceptance of what, how and why other people celebrate. It puts our own cultural identity and celebrations into context and increases the children's knowledge about other cultures.

In nursery we looked at some of the characters used in Chinese writing and had a go at copying some of them on the mark making table. The characters of written Chinese are very beautiful but quite difficult to copy!

We looked at the traditional clothes worn in China and listened to some Chinese music. In our home corner we pretended to use chopsticks and eat from special Chinese bowls. We even tried some real Chinese food at the snack table. We also learned how to say Happy New Year in the Chinese language of Mandarin, 'Kung hei fat choy.'

We watched a program about some Chinese children, who were celebrating Chinese New Year and learned about the lucky red envelopes that they receive and a celebratory dance that they do called the Dragon Dance then at the end of the session we did our very own Dragon Dance to the special Dragon Dance music using our own dragon costume and the dragons head that we had been making in nursery during the week. All the children waved streamers that we had made and played instruments, as the Dragon danced through nursery...Wow! They looked fantastic!