Happy Monday, I hope you had a wonderful weekend with your families.
This week it is Science week- This year the focus for Science week is Space. Over the course of the week the children will have the opportunity to engage and explore a variety of experiences with a space theme. Today the children had the opportunity to make Name rockets which I will explain in further detail later in the post. Some other experiences we have planned for the week is making galaxy bottles, if you could bring I a small plastic bottle from home this week that would be awesome for your child to make their own galaxy sensory bottle. We will be creating space pictures using puffy paint
• Self help skills. This week we will be continuing to strengthen our self help skills, as we serve our meals, pack away our activities once we have finished with them, putting our belongings in our lockers, putting on our shoes and making decisions about our play. Today it was great to see the children showing more confidence in organising their materials for their play with very minimal support.
This morning at group time after we had gone through our usual routine of doing the roll, singing our welcome song and bug and roll, and communicating what we would like to do during our time at Kindergarten today, we then moved on to explore our topic of Spiders. This morning I asked the children whether they would like to continue to learn about spiders or if they would like to learn about another bug or insect. The children were all very eager to continue to investigate spiders further. Today I introduced the children to a new video about spiders called “Spiders for kids.” After watching the video the children all had a turn to share what they had learnt about spiders. Here is what the children learnt today, Layla: “They make webs.” Levii: “A Spider has eight legs.” “They eat Cockroach. “Emily: “They make cobwebs.” “They also have some normal webs.” Astrid:“They make webs. “Jacob: “They grow very big.” The spider webs seemed to be an area of interest for the children today, we will have to look at exploring this further. Tomorrow I will provide pictures of different types of spider for the children to look at, maybe they would like to paint or draw their own using these pictures as inspiration.
After group time the children moved off into their chosen activities. On offer this morning to continue our theme and exploration of spiders, the children had the opportunity to make their own spider. Through this experience the children were encouraged to think about how many eyes a spider has and draw this on their paper plate, colour in the spider’s body and then the children used strips of paper which they folded to make crinkly legs for their spider. It was great to see the children concentrating and working so hard as they created their spiders using the knowledge that they have learnt from the videos and any existing knowledge to help work out how many eyes and legs spiders have. As this experience was quite time intensive for the children, they will have the opportunity to revisit this experience this afternoon and tomorrow to complete their spiders.
As mentioned earlier the children had the opportunity to create their own name rocket. This experience was a great opportunity for the children to practice their name recognition skills as well as identifying the individual letters that make up their name. Throughout this experience the children had the opportunity to practice their scissor skills as they cut out the triangle which would form the top of their rocket, here we worked on using the correct technique and how to hold our scissors safely when we are walking around the room. I was really impressed to see the children really persisting with holding their scissors correctly even though it was very tricky for some. The children had the opportunity to either have me write their individual letters on the squares of paper or if they wanted too they could write their letters on the squares. It was great to see some of our friends having the confidence to write the letters of their names. I then encouraged the children to find their name tags which they would use to help support them put their name rocket together. This proved a great strategy, and allowed the children to be independent when they were a little bit stuck. I was so impressed with how the children worked through this activity, good job everyone.
This morning there was lots of wonderful child-initiated play happening. Home corner was a hive of activity as the lots of the children enjoyed dressing up in outfits. The children told me they were off to the shops to buy toys and food. They had also set up a lovely looking picnic. It was great to see some wonderful collaborative and cooperative play happening at the dolls house between Astrid and Emily.
Once we had packed up for the morning the children asked if we could do some dancing. Today the songs of choice were the skeleton dance, musical freeze, animal freeze, freestyle dancing to Crazy frog and as we were all very excited and full of energy, we did sleeping bunnies to finish off to help calm our bodies. We then listened to two stories, The very busy spider and The very hungry spider.
For lunch today the children had the opportunity to use their self-help skills and decision making skills as they served up their yummy lunch of Tuna pizza and a variety of salad vegetables.
• In the afternoon outside during quiet activity time the children had the opportunity to engage in a variety of experiences. Expressing their creativity and imagination through drawing with pencils, reading books, puzzles and building with the Lego.
Conversational reading with individual children. Using the 3s strategy See, show, say. This afternoon I will be providing the opportunity for children to engage in some special one on one reading with me.
Have a lovely afternoon everyone
Miss Emma