Last week in Reception we celebrated the Hindu festival of Diwali. We learnt a lot about Diwali through a range of different activities:

The word Diwali means ‘Rows of lighted lamps’ and the celebration is also known as ‘The festival of light’ so we practised our cutting skills and made our own paper lanterns, decorating them with coloured tissue paper and shiny sequins –

Rangolis are colourful patterns that Hindus create outside their homes to guide and welcome the Goddess Lakshmi. We coloured in some Rangoli patterns –  we also created our own using a variety of resources including chalks to draw Rangoli patterns at the entrance to our classroom, seeds and beads to make Rangoli patterns in the playdough and we also used a program called ‘Slice’ to design Rangoli patterns on the computer and SMART Board –

 

 

 

When learning about Diwali we also heard the traditional Hindu story of Rama and Sita which is often told using shadow puppets. We made our our puppets by drawing around a template on black card, carefully cutting it out then fixing an art straw to the back. When our puppets were complete, we demonstrated how to make shadows with them on the SMART Board using the light from the projector –

In preparation for Diwali, many Hindus ladies decorate their hands with a special paint known as henna. These are called Mehndi patterns. We did not have any henna in school so instead we cut out paper hands and drew our own Mehndi patterns with a pencil –

One of our favourite Diwali activities was making and eating some traditional sweets called Barfis. We mixed condensed milk, icing sugar, coconut and food colouring then rolled them into a ball and covered them with more coconut. We put them in the fridge to set and when they were ready, we all enjoyed tasting them!