Happy Children’s Day everyone! Today is about celebrating children who are part of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children community.
We had lots of themed activities to mark the occasion including:
- Group time discussions – about what we know about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture
- Clapsticks – dot painting some bark and large twigs to use as clapsticks later
- Making a Family Kinship tree – painting our names on leaves and on the other side the Aboriginal (Yugambeh) name of someone special to us e.g. “waijung” for mother
- Nature bracelets – using sticky tape and leaves, flowers, seeds to make natural bracelets and talk about how fortunate we are for all the resources in this land
- “What culture means to me” posters – drawing our families, where we live, art patterns that we like
The enjoyed the range of different responses for the special person/people for our family tree including brothers, sisters, mums, dads, grandmothers, grandfathers, friends, teachers and families. It was great to learn some new indigenous words and we hope to incorporate these some more into our daily routines.
We also had a special treat today with Reid bringing a cool rock and his volcano for the share bag. The children excitedly counted down until we mixed the ingredients and the reaction happened. It was an awesome experience and prompted lots of questions from the children. We may extend on this with some other experiments that have a big reaction like this.
Thanks for reading the blog today. Hope you enjoyed.
Mr Andrew and Miss Jess