It’s Friday! Welcome to the end of our short week after the holidays, this week has just blown by so quickly with all the fun we’ve had.
Today our Kindergarten children were greeted by Miss Jess who had set up some awesome new activities including a chalk pathway where the children had to spin, balance, walk like crabs and leap like kangaroos. Other activities included shaving foam sensory experience which was initially daunting for the children but I was proud of them eventually getting stuck in and mixing it around.
For our morning group time we talked about our birthdays as it was Hendrix birthday next door. We continued our fairy tale stories and today was a classic that all the children knew. The Three Little Pigs. We read our story and the children joined in with the words along the way “Little pig, Little pig let me in”, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin”, “Then I’ll huff and puff and I’ll blow your house down!”. The lesson the children took from this story was that it is important to do things properly and be as prepared as possible. They also added that the best way to beat the wolf was to work together so it was great to see their brains thinking in different ways.
We went outside and put some pig and wolf masks on and acted out the story and the children absolutely loved this! They did it again and again, mixing around the different roles and eventually the teachers stepped back and let them act it out themselves. This was an excellent opportunity to develop communication skills and getting them to understand the concept of compromise if they had to wait for a turn to be something else.
Just before lunch we practiced more sport and movement skills such as, hopping and chasing games, catching and throwing games and also a game where we had to wave a big board and try knock over some sticks just like in the fairy tale story. We do our catching games with lots of different objects to try and challenge their physical skills. We use items like bean bags, tennis balls, basketballs and rubber balls. Each have different properties that the children have to try and deal with and they will be developing ideas about the physical world and how different materials act. They will also be gaining insight into concepts like mass, gravity, elasticity. Games can definitely be opportunities to explore science as well even when we don’t realise it! The definition of science from Wikipedia is “a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe” which is what children do when they explore and play and experiment in different ways over and over again.
After lunch we had a group time and Wyatt shared a special book from his home. It was a photo album of his parents wedding day. He showed us who all the people were and said that it was special to him because his “mummy and daddy looked happy”. It was a sweet moment and great to hear Wyatt speaking confidently to his friends about his special item in the share bag.
Our afternoon was filled with other relaxing activities like colouring, Lego creations and a short movie time where we watched part of Frozen 2. The Kindergarten children loved mixing with the vacation share children and it helps them develop more social skills where they aren’t necessarily the leader of activities. Thank you vacation care children for being so kind and caring for the younger ones.
Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you again next week.
Apologies for no photos hopefully we will be able to edit the post soon as we had some awesome videos to share.
