We started our Diwali week by watching and listening to the story of how Rama saved his wife Sita after she was taken into the forest by an evil demon named Ravana. With the help of the monkey king Hanuman, Rama rescued Sita and they found their way back home by following a trail of little lamps, called divas, that people had put along the path to light their way. On our small world area we used stick puppet characters and props including a palace, bridge, trees and tealights to retell the story. 

 

In the story Rama and Sita go over a bridge to cross a river so we made our own bridges from Duplo and wooden building blocks for Rama and Sita. It was a challenge to make our bridges go up over the fabric river, and then we needed to think about how Rama and Sita would get up onto the bridge and down onto the other side! 

 

These are the model palaces we made for Rama and Sita on their return.

 

The festival of Diwali gets it's name from the clay lamps called divas that lit the way home for Rama and Sita. After looking at photogrpahs of real diva lamps, we made our own from playdough by making thumb pots. We made sure they were big enough to hold a tealight and decorated them with colourful beads. 

Once we had practised making thumb pots we used our skills to make a clay diva. The clay was a lot more tricky to use than playdough, but we used our hand muscles to roll a ball, then pressed our thumbs in to make a space large enough for the tealight.

Once our pots were dry we used metallic paint to decorate them and added some gems for a bit of extra sparkle!

 

We also made traditional rangoli patterns using brightly coloured pastels..........

..........mandala patterns using seeds pressed into playdough.................

 

...............and mendhi hand patterns using brown pencils.

 

We set up a diwali party in the role play area and decorated it with our rangoli patterns, paper chains and lanterns that we had made ourselves.

When we went to the party we took cards we had written to our friends in the Antelopes class. We took our time to colour in the designs on the cards carefully.

Happy Diwali!