Trips are very important to us here at Willows and we aim to go on at least 2 trips away from the local area each month. We believe that trips are important for a wide range of things. Trips provide the children with rich learning opportunities, including hands-on and interactive experiences, building on what the children are learning in the nursery and allowing them to make their own links between home, nursery, the topics they are learning, and their own personal experiences.
Trips encourage the children to interact with each other on a social level different from that in the nursery or home setting and provide the children with new and inspiring conversational topics. Taking the children out of the setting also provides the children with additional opportunities to enhance their listening skills. Outside, they need to listen more attentively and follow directions and interpret expectations set by their teachers for the outing.
Many of our children celebrated the new year here in London on 31st December. The children have been learning about how the new year is celebrated around the world and most recently, they have been learning about the Chinese new year.
To extend our celebrations of Chinese new year, some of the older children took a trip to Chinatown! Once there, the children were tasked with looking for this year’s lunar animal: the rabbit. They searched through the beautifully decorated streets of Chinatown and found countless rabbits! They also found a range of other animals during their exploration, including tigers, dragons, and live crabs in a restaurant window!
In Chinatown, the menus are easily visible on the street. The children looked at each menu and its pictures. They discussed the different types of food they could see on the menu like dumplings, noodles, and rice dishes. They looked at the similarities and differences between the menus and the foods they have at home. They also talked about which foods on the menu they would like to try and why.
The children looked around at all of the wonderful decorations displayed throughout the streets. They compared them to the decorations they have had in their homes recently for Christmas and new year. They looked at the different shapes and sizes of the lanterns and saw some money wallets which were used to create a beautiful display in a store window. They looked at all of the gold, red, and yellow colours used to decorate the streets and shops and saw a tree decorated with money wallets, which they compared to their Christmas trees at home.
They had an amazing time on their trip and told their younger friends all about their trip and the amazing things they discovered on their outings. They can’t wait for their next trip: The Army Museum!
