Let's Celebrate Diwali
The Bears celebrated Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Our role play area transformed into a bright Diwali home celebration, decorated with our colourful paper lanterns and rangoli patterns. We coloured and wrote Diwali cards for our friends, then took them to our Diwali celebration.
On small world, we retold the Hindu story of Rama and Sita. The theme of the story is light overcoming dark and good (Rama and Sita) overcoming evil (the demon Ravana). In construction, we built bridges to help Rama cross to the island to save Sita.
During Diwali, bright rangoli patterns are drawn on the floor to welcome visitors. The rangoli represents happiness and positivity, and we enjoyed colouring the rangoli patterns with bright pastels and working outside in groups creating rangoli with chalks.
We traced and created mehndi patterns on hand outlines and made playdough mandalas by pressing seeds and beans into spicy playdough.
On the practical table, we created diya lamps with sparkly playdough and beads. Later in the week, we progressed to clay. We modelled the clay, then painted and decorated the lamps. The Bears were really excited to wrap the diya lamps in their printed tissue paper to take home.
Fireworks play a significant role in Diwali celebrations, as fireworks light up the sky and drive out the darkness. We built words on firework themed mats and wrote words on phoneme frame picture cards. We used our grapheme/sound mats to help us. We continued to make firework pictures, this time using a salad spinner to whizz paint around, then we sprinkled on some glitter. We also printed colourful fireworks using cardboard tubes. Now we have a wonderful firework celebration display in the Bears classroom. Finally, we had our own firework celebration with our decorated biscuits, hot chocolate and fireworks on our interactive board.
Next week, we celebrate birthdays with Kipper the dog.