Happy Monday everyone, welcome back to another wonderful week in the Kindergarten.
This morning at group time we continued our discussions surrounding emotions, firstly revisiting last weeks focus emotion of what makes us feel sad?, and what can we do if we are feeling sad? It was great to hear the children remembering some of discussion from last week, and it has been great to see the children putting some of these strategies into practice with support. We then moved on to discussing our emotion of the week which is when we are feeling angry, we first read our feelings book about when I’m feeling angry, before moving onto a discussion about what makes the children feel angry. The children’s responses to this today surrounded when friends hurt them, or if somebody takes their toys. Over the rest of the week we will continue to talk about what makes us feel angry and we will work together to come up with some ideas of what we can do if we are feeling angry. At home it would be great if you could incorporate this work on our emotions, this could simply be identifying how the children are feeling, this will help them put labels to their emotions and to start understanding how they can manage them or how we can support them.
After we had concluded our group time we then moved inside to explore and discover what exciting activities were awaiting us. This morning I had set up the slime again for the children to revisit as a few of the children on Friday had asked if they could play with it again. As the children had enjoyed the scooping experience last week with the rice, I thought the children might enjoy scooping up the slime and transferring it into some containers, along with the scoops I placed some coloured stones for the children to either scoop out with the scoops, or they could use the tongs to pick these up. What fun the children had as they engaged and explored this activity, a few of the children enjoyed picking up the slime and squishing it between their fingers, and scooping it up with their hands and letting it fall down, as well as scooping up the slime and transferring it into the containers and pouring it back out again. As the children engaged in this experience we talked about what it felt and looked like. Tomorrow the children have asked to have the slime out again, we will place the same materials out again tomorrow with the addition of maybe some animals if the children would like. This activity was great for the children to further develop their fine motor strength as they used the scoops and tongs, they were using their hand eye coordination and tracking skills as they transferred the slime into the containers, this experience also had an element of persisting with difficulty and problem solving as they worked out how to get the slippery slime into the containers, as well as using their communication skills and exploring with their sense of touch.
To continue with our theme of strengthening our fine motor skills today with our play dough the children had the opportunity to practice their scissor skills as they cut the play dough into pieces. It was great to see how confident the children that engaged with this experience were at using the scissors. Some children chose to cut big pieces of play dough while others like to cut tiny pieces. This was a great opportunity for us to explore mathematical language such as big, little and tiny. As the children continued to explore the play dough we had some wonderful creative and imaginative play occurring as they created transformers, turtles, people, mountains, my Mum and balls. I wonder what wonderful creations the children will come up with tomorrow.
Construction was also very popular among the children today as they constructed a variety of structures. One of which was a house which two of the children worked very collaboratively and cooperatively with one another as they created their house using wooden blocks, bamboo shoots, cars and coloured stones. As they created their house it was great to see the children using their problem solving skills as they worked out how to build their house with the attaching ramps.
Other play this morning included small world play with animals and open ended materials, this gave the children the opportunity to use their creativity and imagination as they engaged with the animals and created their own scenes. It also provided the children to engage with their peers in cooperative play. Exploring sound as the children showed an interest in exploring the variety of instruments. Books are also continuing to be popular with the children finding a quiet space to read some of my books that I have brought in. I would love it if the children could bring in a special book from home that we could read at group time or one on one reading.
This afternoon after our quiet time, the children will have the opportunity to express their creativity and imagination through painting, exploring the shape connectors and small world play and further strengthening their fine motor skills as they revisit the geoboards that we had out last week.
Have a great afternoon everyone 🙂
Miss Emma
