Year of the Snake

This year the Chinese New Year will be celebrated on February 10th. 2013 marks the year of the snake. Celebrations for this event include parades with dragons, and eating various foods with chop-sticks, such as dumplings, sweet and sour chicken, chicken chow mein and much much more! Also, there will be fireworks and lots of red and gold coloured items because red and gold are considered lucky colours. In London for this event there will be big festivities this Sunday. In our school, year 1 have celebrated by making this beautiful display. Gong Xi Fa Cai! (Happy Chinese New Year in Mandarin)

Houses of Parliament

On the Friday, 25th January, the year 6 class went to the Houses of Parliament. Once we exited from the Westminster tube station we received some passes to go into parliament: if you don’t have one, they will not let you go past and there are police everywhere guarding! We went down into this underground place and we went up into the parliament building. We were put into 2 groups. My group went to the House of Commons where there was live debate going on. We got out and walked towards the House of Lords and apparently the House of Commons has more power than the House of Lords. We found out that the queen only visits the House of Lords once a year and her role is not that important in the House of Commons because she is only the head of the monarch. When we were finished we had our own debate about keeping or getting rid of SATs. We had these little tablets and we put our answers in them and at the end we decided that we should keep SATs. Overall, it was a great learning experience!