This week in RME we are learning about the story behind the Christian festival of Christmas.

Bodhi Day is celebrated by some Buddhists on the 8th of December.  It celebrates the Day of Enlightenment of Siddhartha, the Buddha.

There are a festival called Hanukkah, .Every Saturday they go to a temple but there’s something really special to them it is the menorah!  The menorah has nine candles and they light it up every day with a special oil. But one day there was an army because of the Greeks. They killed lots of people  and the broke all of the special oil.  But there is some people called the Maccabees, they were very brave  They fought the Greeks even with not a lot of people  but the Maccabees looked everywhere.  They only found one bottle so they lit it up.  It would only last for one day and it takes eight days to make more oil!  It was eight day it stayed lit, everyone was happy!!

We are continuing our journey around the world to find out about different winter festivals.  This week we are learning about Hanukkah!  This year, Hannukah takes place from 2 December to 10 December.  Here is a video to share at home about this festival.

Here are some of our completed puppets with their original designs:

We had great fun using our designs to make our first puppets of our topic.

When making puppets, first you need to know who your characters are.

Diwali:  Hindu festival of light.  We watched the story of Sita and Raman.  Other characters were Ravana and Hanuman.

Then you need to sketch your character as a puppet, and annotate the sketch.  This helps us decide what resources to use.

Diwali is a type of  celebration.  There are rainbow fireworks and sparklers.  The characters names  were Sita,  Rama, Ravana and the monkey king.

This term we are learning about winter festivals from around the world.  Diwali was on Wednesday, 7 November, 2018.  This Hindu festival is our starting our topic.  We watched this video earlier today, and later this week we will be making puppets to recreate the story of Rama and Sita.