Chinese New Year 2025: The Year of the Snake!

This week the children have been learning all about the Chinese New Year, which this year, is the Year of the Snake and as such, the children have also been learning about snakes.

Chinese lanterns were made, and each child was given a red envelope with a chocolate coin inside which is a Chinese tradition where this is given for good luck. The children also had noodles, vegetable spring rolls, and prawn crackers to eat. The noodles went down a storm; they all loved them!

The children have been very busy making snake sock puppets which each child named. We had a Bluey, Dondy, Sammy, and Peggy, for example. They listened to a story called Mouse Count, whereby 10 mice were playing, until they fell asleep and then a snake came along, caught them, put them in a jar to eat. The mice woke up, tricked the snake and then they all escaped. Pretend mice were hidden around the room, and with their snake puppets the children re-enacted the story – lots of counting was done by all, as well as learning that snakes like to eat mice.

We painted snake masks and pretended to be snakes, and we played snakes and ladders as a group and excellent turn taking and counting was done.

On Wednesday, we had a very special visitor, a snake called Sid came to preschool to meet the children. They were all very excited to meet Sid and were all very brave and went and gently stroked Sid. The lady who very kindly brought Sid, talked about snakes to the children, about what they ate, how they moved, smelt and what noise they make. They also learnt that snakes cannot close their eyes.

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