Hello everyone and welcome back after a long weekend. Hopefully it was filled with fun and excitement and you are all refreshed for a new week.
Today we welcomed back some new friends across many of the classrooms and we welcomed back Braxton in the Kindergarten room. He was immediately running around outside with his friends playing ball games and chasing games. Braxton, Mace and Sonni had an interesting discussion while they stopped for a drinks break. This was the beginning of our merry adventure of “WHY?” and “HOW?” questions that led the focus for most of the morning.
They were debating who’s drink bottle could hold the most water. Braxton thought his because it was tallest, Sonni thought his because his bottle could stretch to fit more in. This has prompted an idea for making a small pouring activity for the children where they can explore volumes of different containers so we may do that later in the week.
During our morning tea we continued our discussions from last week about where our food comes from. It has been great to have smaller groups of children at the moment because they can all have a chance to give their input. At the same time however, it gives the children lots of opportunities to practice their verbal skills at trying to enter a conversation and converse with others. We managed to figure out where each of the foods came from (tree, bush or made from ingredients). Somehow we got onto the topic of melting and we talked about what types of materials would melt and what ones would burn. We did a little experiment with some margarine and asked the children whether it would burn or melt and they all guessed right! That led to another conversation about how a microwave works so we all rubbed our hands together really fast to show that friction makes them warm up. The microwave radiation makes the water molecules in the air move around in response to the change in electric field which creates heat and this heat is transferred to the food. It was a tricky concept to explain. We then talked about how we need to be careful with microwaves to make sure they are cooking the food properly and killing the bacteria that could be in the food.
The class focus today was around different shapes. We used rubber bands and a peg board to make some of the more conventional shapes like circles, squares, triangles and rectangles. I then hid some other shapes like pentagons, hexagons, parallelograms and trapeziums to see if they could find the new shapes and name them. We also had a fun matching activity where the children had to place the shapes in the right spot to make some awesome pictures. Extending knowledge about shapes helps children to navigate their world and recognise more objects e.g. beehives are hexagon shaped. It can also help develop their drawing skills and make letter recognition easier.
Our sport and movements session focussed on two types of catching. Catching balls and catching each other! Today we were catching small plastic balls and the children have been doing very well getting their hands in the right position and persisting even when they drop them. We did a small throwing game pretending to throw “soap bubbles” at the “corona virus”. We then finished off with a game of “candlesticks” which in one of their favourite games at the moment.
After lunch we had some free play activities where everyone found some creative ways to play with the small coloured animal figurines and cardboard tubing. Some made house, some packed the animals in the tubes and others made a small farm. After this activity the children dispersed around the classroom with Astrid, Eva and Harper enjoying the home corner while Mace and Braxton explored some water play.
Later in the afternoon we will hopefully head outdoors and do some soccer games and other physical activity games. Hopefully you enjoyed our blog today and see you again soon.
Braxton, Mace and Sonni discussing who’s drink bottle would hold the most.
Our margarine melting experiment
Astrid changing the day, date, month and time on the calendar
Mace tracing the numbers. He has loved this activity recently
The sandpaper letter have become very popular again. Children want to spell their own names. Sonni was using the “u” creatviely to find an extra “n”
We have been doing lots of estimating games and the answers have slowly been getting more accurate the more we do this.
