Diwali in Reception :)

In reception, we have been learning about Diwali. We thought about different types of celebrations and talked about religion for the first time. Some of the children in our class are Hindu and celebrate Diwali so it was great to have some experts in the class!

 We read a book all about the story of Diwali. It helped us to understand why Diwali is called ‘The Festival of Lights’. We loved finding out all about Rama and Sita and how they used the lights to guide them. 

We loved this idea and decided to make our own Diwa Lamps that we could put candles in so that we could see the lights, just like in the story.
We used clay to make them and thought about the shape. We needed to make sure that there was space in our lamp to put the candles!
While we were making our lamps we thought about how we could decorate them. Some children in our class were so excited that they couldn’t wait until the clay was dry to put sequins and glitter on their Diwa Lamps!

When our lamps dried, we painted them and decorated them. We made them so beautiful and thought about all the different colours and materials we could use to make them stand out. Mohamed made a lovely sparkly Diwa Lamp with lots of glitter. Welll done Mohamed!

The week after, we thought about how different families celebrate Diwali. It was great finding out about the story but then we needed to know about how to celebrate! We found out that Hindu families watch the fireworks to celebrate the 'Festival of Light', pray and eat sweets.

Then we watched a great video that also told us all about the different ways that Hindus celebrate Diwali.

In this video, we found out about Rangoli patterns and how they bring good luck. We loved the different shapes and colours of the Rangoli Patterns so we decided to make our own! We coloured in a beautiful sheet with lots of different shapes and patterns and even had a go at drawing our patterns on the floor outside! Look how great they look:

We loved learning all about Diwali but it was also very interesting to think about the similarities between Diwali and other religious celebrations. We realised that for lots of celebrations we give gifts and often eat lots of lovely and interesting food! Some of our children told us they celebrate Eid and some celebrate Christmas.

Alya told us, 

I celebrate Happy Birthday.

This was a brilliant idea because it made us think about how some celebrations are religious but some are not! It was so interesting learning about how different children and adults may have different experiences because of what they believe in. 

We asked one of our children who celebrate Diwali whether she goes to the temple and she said she does! We found out that some of our children also go to church to celebrate during their religious festivals, such as Easter and Christmas. Also, some children go to the Mosque to celebrate Eid. 

 Some children weren’t sure if they celebrate anything so we gave them a home learning challenge to find out! Knowing about what we celebrate helps us to find out more about our religion, if we have one, and our family! This is important and we were so excited to find out about what our children in reception celebrate. This is what we found out:

Aaliyah, dad and her two sisters are Christian, my mum is sikh. We all celebrate Christmas, birthdays, new year and Aaliyah joins in with Diwali celebrations by lighting candles, going temple and to church. She enjoys eating Samosas and sometimes sweets called jelabi. Both of our families come together to celebrate.

 Another child in Reception celebrates Easter, Christmas and helps their grandparents as part of their families many traditions. They sent in some Christmas photos for us to see too!

One of our children did their home learning all about Diwali and taught us even more!

We celebrate Diwali festival of lights. During Diwali we offer puja (prayers), meet family and friends wish each other, have sweets and burn crackers. We also celebrate Holi festival of colours. 

We were so lucky that this family also sent in some lovely picture of their celebrations:

Lots of our children don’t celebrate Diwali but they loved getting involved and thinking about how Hindus celebrate and why. We can’t wait to learn all about some more religious celebrations now, it was so interesting!