Welcome friends and families to a new week in the Kindergarten class here at Riversdale Early Learning. We welcome back a few friends after having time off for the school holidays, it’s good to see you back with us.
Our day started off indoors sharing some time with the other classrooms and before school care. It is only for a short while but it is great for the children’s social development to be able to mix with other age groups as they can take turns and being leaders and followers depending on who they are mixing with.
After separating back to our own classrooms we did our normal routine of the roll and calendar but we have recently been adding an analog clock to our morning routine to get the children familiar with reading a clock. Harper absolutely loves this activity and often revisits it throughout the day, trying to copy the time on the real clock and asking what time it is. This is an important skill because children can get more of and understanding about when and why certain things are happening e.g. “it’s 7 O’clock which means bed time”.
We read our daily fairytale story and today it was The Ugly Duckling. The children listened attentively, making some excellent informed guesses as to what might come next. Reid said he liked the way the baby ducks had yellow feathers and Harper said it was cute when the mother was teaching them to swim. The moral of this story was that it is mean to tease others for how they look and even if some people do tease you there will always be others that see you as beautiful. Eva said she was happy that the swan was beautiful in the end and Mace said he liked how the other swans were friendly.
Afterwards we tried to make some origami swans but this may have been a bit difficult for the children but lots of fun was had anyway. This is a skill we could focus on in the future as the children loved folding paper to make the “chatterboxes” but also needed a lot of help with that activity.
After our fire drill last week we decided to continue this learning to help the children be fire safe and aware of what to do in an emergency. We had a small quiz that each child had to do and then they could be presented with their fire safety certificate. I was impressed with the children’s knowledge in the quiz and also their answers to the teachers follow up questions.
After our lunch we dressed and decorated some more fairy dolls and Mr Andrew wrote some messages from our friends onto each person’s card. The messages were wonderfully sweet and helped to foster a sense of friendship, belonging and kind behaviour that we want to establish in the classroom. We are currently still doing a lot of work ensuring that our actions to each other are kind and thoughtful, including our actions towards our teachers.
The plan for the afternoon is to continue our musical practice of our class favourite songs and also colours of Australia which we have been practicing everyday. We might relax with some yoga stories before the children get all of their favourite equipment out of the play shed such as balls, bikes and the sandpit equipment.
Thanks everyone for a great start to the week. See you again soon.
