Let's Celebrate Diwali
The Bears celebrated Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Our role-play area was 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.
Fireworks play a significant role in Diwali celebrations, as fireworks light up the sky and drive out the darkness. In Bears, we created firework pictures with a salad spinner to whizz paint around, then we sprinkled on some glitter. We also created messy but fun firework splatter paintings. Now we have a wonderful firework celebration display in our classroom.
On Monday the 11th of November, we held the poppies we had made to observe a two minute silence during a remembrance assembly. To help us understand why we do this, we watched the CBeebies Poppies animation and listened to the beautiful story Where the Poppies Now Grow. The children were quiet and respectful, and we were very proud of them. We painted and created poppies to display in our book corner windows and made loose part poppies with buttons, pompoms and coloured stones.
Next time, we celebrate birthdays with Kipper the dog.