We started off by listening to and watching the story of Diwali and how Rama saved his wife Sita after she was taken into the forest by an evil demon called Ravana. With the help of the monkey king Hanuman Rama rescued Sita and they found their way back home by following a trail of lamps called divas that people had put along the path to light their way. We used stick puppets and props including a palace, bridge, trees and tealights to re-enact the story with our friends and were great at pretending to be the characters!

In the story Rama and Sita go over a bridge to cross the river, so our challenge in the construction area was to make a bridge from Duplo so our Playmobil Rama and Sita could cross the fabric river! It was quite tricky joining the pieces to go over the river then balancing the figures on top, but we kept trying and got there in the end. Look at some of the different ideas we had to solve the challenge!

       

After looking at photographs of diva lamps for inspiration, we learnt how to make our own thumb pots - first using playdough and decorating them with beads, then using clay. Clay was a lot more tricky to use than playdough, but we used our hand muscles to work the clay into the right shape and made sure there was enough space to fit a tealight inside. Once they were dry we painted our diva lamps using metallic paints and added some gems for extra sparkle! 

         

We also created our own versions of traditional diwali patterns called rangoli patterns using chalks, pastels and seeds in playdough, and displayed these in our role play area - which was a Diwali celebration complete with cards, paper chains and lanterns we had made ourselves. 

        

             

Even our maths had a Diwali theme! We sorted a basket of diwali items into bowls then counted how many items were in each and found the matching number card. We also counted how many diwali items were on picture cards (by crossing off each one with a whiteboard pen as we counted it), found the number iron our number fans, then used our number fan to help us write the number.