Xin Nian Kuile!
Spring Festival approaches and the pupils of Wellington College Bilingual Shanghai (with a little bit of help from their teachers) demonstrated their amazing talents as they performed for their families on Thursday and Friday.
This is our first Chinese New Year celebration here at the setting – how far we have come and how much we have grown. I remember clearly the new year message sent from Wellington College Bilingual Shanghai last year. It was before our official opening and I thanked the Shanghai community for their very warm welcome and the reception we had received as we started our journey as the third Wellington College in China. One year on and nobody could have foreseen the good fortune, partnerships, friendships and experiences that we have been blessed with.
2017 is the Lunar Year of the Rooster. One fifth of the world’s population will join in the celebration of Spring Festival this year, honouring a tradition which dates back over 3,500 years to the Shang Dynasty. The new lunar year brings with it the opportunity of new beginnings, new hope, new challenges, new stories to be written and new memories to be made. Spending time with family and friends, re-establishing old ties, giving gifts and feasting together; the Chinese community celebrate the coming of a new lunar year. Wishes for good health, an abundance of happiness and much prosperity are sent between family members and local communities.
As we enter the Lunar New Year of the Rooster, we look forward to the next part of our journey together. The Wellington College family continues to grow and with the fourth family member joining us in Hangzhou, we look forward to a bright future here in China. On behalf of the pupils and the team here at Wellington College Bilingual Shanghai, I would like to express our sincere best wishes to all Wellington College families and the wider Shanghai community as you celebrate spring festival.
A wonderful performance!
Please note that we break for Spring Festival on Friday 20th January and return on Monday 6th February.
The week beginning 6th February 2017 is all about me, dinosaurs and pirates!
Early Years 1
EY1 pupils will be coming back to our setting full of stories to tell about their Lunar New Year break. We will be talking about their trips, activities, friends and family members they have visited.
We will continue to work on the Family topic. We will be bringing parents clothing and pretend play being mom, dad, grandma, grandpa or any other chosen member of our pupil’s family!
We will be reading the books ‘My Mom’, ‘My Dad’, ‘Wo hao dan xin’ and singing songs including ‘If you are happy and you know it’, ‘ru guo gan dao gao xing ni jiu pai pai shou’ and ‘Hello!’. We will be making lanterns to celebrate yuan xiao jie (Lantern Festival).
Early Years 2
On English-focus days the children will look at sensory play when the sand pit is made into a small dinosaur world,
counting their feet and seeing how many will fit into a large dinosaur footprint, drawing their own dinosaur using
different mediums, building a volcano, as well as completing a hand dinosaur and using their own names to create a new
dinosaur name. On Chinese-focus days, the children will build our EY2 dinosaur museum by making different parts of one
dinosaur then putting them together, talk about three areas that the dinosaurs lived in, as well as explore the reason
of the extinction of dinosaurs.
We are going to read the English stories ‘Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs’ by Bryan Barton, ‘How do dinosaurs’ series by Jane
Yolen, and the Chinese story ‘You look delicious’（’你看起来好像很好吃’）. The children will also enjoy their time with our daily
songs ‘Dinosaurs Lived a Long Long Time Ago’，’T-rex stomp around the earth’ and ‘If the dinosaurs still alive’ (Chinese
song ‘如果恐龙还活着’)
Early Years 3
In Chinese in EY3, we will be focusing on the Lantern Festival. We will be learning the song ‘Yuan xiao’ and
talking about the poem ‘Jing ye si’. During activity times, we will be making lanterns to decorate the lobby and
making our own Chinese costumes using traditional patterns. We will be using our language skills to listen to and
understand descriptions of everyday classroom objects. The descriptions will be hidden inside the lanterns and we
need to use them to guess what the items are!
In English, we will be continuing with our Pirates theme. We will be reading the story ‘Pirates Love Underpants’
by Claire Freedman and learning the song ‘A sailor went to sea, sea, sea’. During activity times, we will be using
our map reading skills to find hidden treasure in the classroom, using our imagination skills to make pirate versions of
ourselves and using our counting skills to add and take away with pirate coins. We may even start to learn how to
speak like a pirate!
Wellbeing at Wellington College Bilingual Shanghai – a fortnightly focus on Kindness
Nikki Street, our wonderful Wellbeing Co-ordinator has been working with the curriculum teams to look at how we promote
the Wellington Values in our practice. Whilst we incorporate the Values in to everything that we do, to have a focus on
them as individual ideals and principles enhances understanding of them. It also affords pupils the opportunity to
acknowledge when behaviour, actions and words specifically represent Wellington Values and supports modelling of
positive behaviour. The Values of Courage, Kindness, Respect and Responsibility align very well with key aspects of
personal, social and emotional development throughout the Early Years. Integrity is more difficult for young learners to
relate to and will be a focus for slightly more mature learners. The teams will focus on the values in fortnightly
phases:
- Week beginning 6th and 13th February – Kindness
- Week beginning 20th and 27th February – Respect
- Week beginning 6th and 13th March – Responsibility
- Week beginning 20th 27th March – Courage
