Hooray it’s Friday! We have had another great week in the Kindergarten class including today where the children showed some great curiosity and led the focus for many of today’s activities.
Mornings are often when the children are at their most productive and you can see their minds racing away with lots of thoughts. Our discussions at morning tea are always very insightful and today we were discussing about how we can see and hear things. We talked about how light reflects off objects into your eye so that you can see them. We had a little play around with the mirror and practiced learning our left and right. Afterwards this inspired a mirror game where we had to copy the movements our partner was making. The children had so much fun moving their bodies and making funny faces that their friends had to copy.
As we were coming indoors Ellie spotted a big brown butterfly hiding under the climbing net. It was perfectly hidden and this prompted discussions about camouflage and how animals hide from predators. The children gleefully followed the butterfly around the playground as it flew and every time it landed they asked more and more questions. Getting up close to nature is often a very effective way to learn as children are often captivated in the moment and very receptive to new information.
Yesterday we coloured our Mondrian pictures with coloured pencils and today we glued different coloured rectangles to try and achieve the same pattern. I am impressed with how these are turning out. The children are learning skills like comparing and contrasting size to try and fit the rectangles in the defined space, they are also learning terms like horizontal and vertical and lastly they are practicing fine motor skills to be able to glue the pieces in so precisely.
We learnt some new sign language songs today including “Rainbow Rainbow” and ‘Tiny Tim”. I have been impressed with how the children have naturally been able to understand and use some basic sign language like sit down and some animals. We will keep extending on this as a way of developing both sign language and verbal language by learning new songs.
Our sport and movement sessions started with us passing a ball around the circle and sharing with the group what our favourite games are. Braxton said candlesticks, Mace said racing games, Wyatt said bean bag games, Eva said animal circus, Charlotte said tag, Harper said catching games and Ellie said candlesticks too.
In the afternoon we will colour some of our tapping sticks to make “clapsticks” and try and find some aboriginal dance/songs that we can recreate. Thank you for a wonderful day and a wonderful week. Enjoy the weekend.