What a wonderful week we have had! It was Languages Week here at St. Matthew’s and each class chose a language to learn more about. In Reception, we decided to learn about the hindi language. Although hindi is spoken all around the world, it is one of the main languages spoken in India so we set out to find out more about this amazing country; where it is, the animals that live there, a famous building there and of course, some of the delicious food that is eaten there!

We also learnt how to say hello in hindi:

Of course, we just had to take a trip on our magic carpet to find out what India looks like but, as we soon discovered, it is a country of very different landscapes! We also realised that if we were to take a trip to India at this time of year, we might very well arrive in the middle of a rainstorm, as it is monsoon season!

We read the delightful story, ‘Desert Girl, Monsoon Boy’ by Tara Dairman to help us find out more.

We loved the ending of the story where the boy and girl meet and dance around the fire together (and many of us predicted that this might happen!). We wanted the children to experience the hindi language a little more and what better way to do so than through music and dance…

First, we rewatched one of our favourite dances of Gene Kelly ‘Singing in the Rain’ in the 1952 movie…

I explained that this film was made in the USA in a place called Hollywood. We then watched a clip from a famous Bollywood film with, you guessed it, people singing and dancing in the (monsoon) rain! The children absolutely loved it and asked for it to be played over and over again! Here is the track we watched:

Next, we watched a video that taught us some of the dance steps:

And then, we had a go ourselves! Here is a screenshot of a video of us dancing – you can find the full video on Seesaw – isn’t our dancing amazing?

Finally, we worked together to make a poster which we shared with the rest of the school at an assembly on Friday.

We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, see you on Monday. Namaste.