Happy Tuesday everyone.
What a wonderful day we have had today. As there has been a abecedarian course happening in the Schoolies room today, we have had a change of scenery to the Senior Kindy room. The children have had a great day exploring this new environment.
Although we were in a different room today, our routine stayed relatively the same. We started our day with some yummy morning tea that Miss Kerrie had made for us, before transitioning into group time. Today we continued our discussion surrounding spiders as we first watched a video with some wonderful spider facts. After the video had finished I encouraged the children to answer to questions that I had developed from the video. Which were What do Spiders eat? Hamilton commented “Mosquitoes”, Layla commented “Bugs and Snakes”, Jaxon commented “Tarantulas”, Astrid commented “They eat leaves”, and Wynter commented “They eat little Mozzies and Mozzie like to eat me too.” Our second question was, What is a spider web called that spiders do not live in anymore? as this was a popular topic yesterday. Jaxon and Levii both commented that it is called a Cobweb. I then opened up the opportunity for the children to share information that they had found out or had found interesting from the video. Hamilton commented “They make webs out of silk”, Jaxon “They make Cobweb”, Levii commented “They make the webs to catch the bugs and they bury them.” Graysen who loves to ask questions asked a great question today “What do spiders eat?”, This time I encouraged the children to help Graysen find the answer out to this question. Levii commented “Cockroach”, Jaxon commented “Tarantulas”, Astrid commented “Moths and Snakes”, and Layla commented “Birds.” Great team work everyone, I loved how the children were such collaborative learners here in helping answer this question. At group time the children had the opportunity to share what they wanted to do today along with singing to of their current favourite songs “Hello to all the children of the world and bugs and roll. It is great to hear from some of the families that the children are singing these at home too.
After group time the children then transitioned off into their chosen activities. Hamilton chose to make a name rocket just as his peers had done yesterday. This provided him with the opportunity to practice his cutting skills as he cut out the triangle for the top of his rocket. I then encouraged Hamilton to work out how many squares of paper he would need for each letter of his name and then he told me what letters to write on each of the squares of paper. Hamilton did a great job.
Today the children had the opportunity to play a game called “What’s missing?” one on one with me today. This was a great opportunity for the children to build on their language skills, naming items, developing confidence, following instructions and strengthening their memory recall skills. In the beginning I started with just three objects, I encouraged the children to point to and label each of the items before I covered them up taking one item away and encouraging the children to try and remember which item was missing. As the children developed confidence and competence I added more items encouraging them to label the characteristics with the crayon calling it a pink crayon, and instead of dinosaur calling it a Triceratops. This was a great activity for me to work one on one with the children and continue to develop our relationship and I was able to assess where they are at and how I can further support them. This would also be a great game for you to play at home with your children using a few items from home. Over the course of the week I will continue to play this game with the children one on one and also in a group situation.
As the children were so excited to explore the new environment there was lots of wonderful child initiated play happening. This included collaborative play in the home corner where the children enjoyed dressing the babies, feeding them food and making a variety of meals. The children also came across some cellphones in the home corner it was great to see them role playing with these as they made phone calls and sent text to their families. There was a lot of small object construction happening as the children used a variety of manipulative building blocks as they constructed cars, transformers, and monster trucks. Hamilton, Jaxon, Wynter and Levii enjoyed exploring and using their imagination together as they engaged in small group play with the Dinosaurs.
After the children had done a fantastic job at cleaning up the classroom we went to the group mat to do some dancing as the children had enjoyed this so much yesterday. Today the children enjoyed dancing and moving to animal freeze, musical freeze, Tooty Ta and walking through the jungle. Before listening to the story the very busy spider before we went out to enjoy some wonderful Yoga. We also played a group game of the “what’s missing” game.
At Yoga today with Miss Gabby we had so much fun as we did our yoga dance to some music where we practiced our yoga moves the rocket ship, tree pose, and starfish. Miss Gabby then encouraged the children to share their ideas of some dance moves that we could incorporate into our dance. A big thank you to Levii, Wynter and Astrid for adding in their dance moves. We then lay down to listen to a wonderful relaxing story where we were encouraged to use our imagination where a baby dragon hatched out of a magical egg. As we listened to this story Miss Gabby encouraged us to practice our breathing taking deep breaths in and out. Great work today everyone.
We hope you have a wonderful afternoon
Miss Emma and Miss Sarah