THERE was plenty of horsing around at a nursery near Shipston as the Chinese New Year celebrations got underway.

Youngsters at Winchcombe Farm Day Nursery, in Upper Tysoe, enjoyed a host of Chinese themed activities last week including Chinese food tasting, noddle and rice play, making lanterns, decorating the nursery with home-made Chinese flags.

Chinese New Year – the year of the horse - stared on Friday and the nursery topped off its celebrations with a special Chinese sweet and sour lunch menu.

Rachel Giorgio, nursery manager, said: “We’ve turned our role play area into a Chinese restaurant the children are having great fun pretending to serve each other food and mixing rice and noodles.

“This is part of an on-going project to teach our children about different festivals, faiths and cultures”.

At Chinese New Year people traditionally wear red clothes and give children "lucky money" contained in red envelopes and to mark the holiday families typically reunite and gather at each other's homes to celebrate and eat together.

It is also tradition for households to thoroughly cleanse the house to sweep away ill fortune and make way for good luck, to decorate windows and doors with red paper-cuts and to light firecrackers.