Happy Tuesday everybody and welcome to the Kindergarten blog. Our day started outdoors with Miss Jess were lots of children were playing with some of their favourite activities like the bikes, sandpit, dolls houses and also the new water pump.
At morning tea time today we had some new fruits like nectarine and mangoes which prompted Eva to ask “Where does that come from?”. It prompted big discussions about where our food comes from. Mace said that it came from the supermarket and we talked about the chain of supply and were the fruit came from before it got to the supermarket. This could be an excellent learning area and hopefully when societal restrictions loosen we could take a behind the scenes trip to a supermarket or other food distribution outlet.
Our focus for today was based on Harper and Sonni’s interest in sequences and patterns. We got some of the colourful pegs and made some different patterns and the children had to figure out which colour would come next. The children did very well at this activity and we quickly had to make the patterns harder. Once the patterns got a little more difficult the children’s interest waned. Persistence and perseverance are qualities I would like to try and instil in the classroom so that the children keep trying even when things are difficult. I have seen these qualities growing when we do our sport and movement sessions so that is positive to see.
Another favourite game at the moment is the “Tummy Ache” game, the children have to draw cards and try make a full meal of healthy food and avoid food contaminated by bugs. This is a great game for manipulating reward schedules, meaning that the children will not always get healthy food and will sometimes get the tummy ache food so they have to deal with not getting what they want in that instant. This is another strong personal quality which will set your children up for success later in life. They need to understand that they can’t always win, but playing fair and having fun are equally important aspects of the game and hopefully it motivates them to keep trying to win next time. We have lots of aspects like this in our classroom for example the “share bag” which only one person a week gets to take home.
Our afternoon was filled with some stories from Mr Andrew’s special Fairy Tale book and other free play activities like building train sets, playdough sculptures and the ever favourite home corner. We got rained in briefly today but hopefully later in the afternoon we can get outside again to release some more energy and develop other skills like upper body strength on the monkey bars and rope obstacle courses.
Thank you for a wonderful day and see you again soon.
