Geography: Chinese display

And it's complete!

Each week we have added a new element to our display and here it is:

Chinese blossom, dragons, koi carp and lastly...the sensory map...enjoy!

Geography: sensory map

The sensory map is great for any cultural units. Out theme this half term was china, therefore in geography each week we have taken a different symbol of china and investigated it. This week we looked at Chinese food which linked to our food technology units.

We had 10 dried foods: green tea, cherry tea, seaweed, star anise, ba Wang flowers, noodles, rice, wolf berry, black fungi and (the stinkiest) dried anchovies.

We started in circle time by smelling and feeling the products then moved onto some group work. Each group had 5 foods to stick on the map, while 1 group was sticking the other group was filling in thumbs up and thumbs down questionnaire to assess if they liked or disliked the smell and feel of all 10 foods! Great activity because the non smelly foods had great textures and the other foods either smelt awesome or absolutely disgusting!

Just be warned your room will stink of fish if you use dried fish but it's so worth it!

Check out the pictures...

Oh...if your doing this for a display like myself make sure you PVA over the top...otherwise your inquisitive students may end up with a mouthful!

The completed map along with Widgit symbols

Clockwise from the right: Wolfberry, Seaweed, Green Tea, Ba Wang Flowers and Star Anise

Dried Anchovies (they stink!)

Seaweed and Noodles

Chinese Koi Carp Display

Yesterday we looked at our third symbol of China, we've had blossom and dragons and now some impressive koi carp! This activity was just short enough to keep the attention span of the class and looks really effective. I introduced it with familiar Chinese objects again and we watched a video of koi carp and talked about why they are symbolic of China. Then got to the good stuff...the art...what do you think, feel free to leave me a comment!

It looks very impressive as a whole display but each element on its own looks good all the same.
Check back next week for the last element and the final unveiling of the China display as a whole!!

Chinese Handprint dragon

Great idea for any Chinese New Year display work you have planned. As part of our Geography project each week we are looking at a different aspect of Chinese culture. This week we made two dragons, a giant dragon body (which is yet to have a head) which I will post a picture of soon, and a great little hand print dragon for a display, which has drawn a lot of attention on the corridor!

My students loved it because it was messy and very tactile but at the same time we were able to think about what a dragons body may be like, it could have scales which are represented by the hand prints and we chose colours at represented china by looking at a range of different artifacts. I then crafted a head for the display.

Not a bad job I wouldn't say!

English PowerPoints for Chinese New Year, Nature and Africa Themes

I have uploaded some PowerPoints to the TES website which you can go and download to use for your English projects.

Firstly...The Chinese New Year story, I made this PowerPoint using communicate in print, it has a shortened version of the story at the bottom of each page with a self made picture to illustrate the text above which was also made using communicate in print. You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Race-Chinese-New-Year-Story-PowerPoint-6164254/

Secondly... Last year I made a Lion King PowerPoint for a literacy project about Africa using images from a book. It has come colour coordinated slides, green for when the text indicates something good is happening and red for the bad things. You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Lion-King-Powerpoint-6164485/

Lastly...we also made a PowerPoint for the story 'After the storm' by Nick Butterworth, which was for the theme of nature. This uses scanned pictures from the book so it isn't quite as inventive as the other but is always there for you to use! You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/After-the-storm-Nick-Butterworth-6164487/

Enjoy!!

Chinese New Year display

So being Chinese New Year this half term our theme of 'Oriental' which is actually a pretty great theme!

Today we started to look at China as a culture and in particular Chinese cherry blossom, we are going to looking at the Chinese new year story 'the great race' so I started our display today. We made a 3D cherry blossom tree by stringing together tissue paper 'blossom' like you would do with popcorn, it made a pretty great effect. For students who have the fine motor skills to be able to do it this is a great activity, very simple, very repetitive but very enjoyable.

For those who were not physically able to do this we made some lovely blossom pictures which will be mounted and displayed later on in the half term. We stenciled the branch on and then simple applied the blossom with scrunched up tissue paper, the effect was really great!