Happy Thursday Senior Kindy Families,
We hope you all have had a wonderful Thursday. To start our morning off, we first begin our morning enjoying the wonderful outdoors as we await for all students to arrive. During this time, today our children found themselves enjoying a range of spontaneous choices of play. Including: cooking in our mud kitchen, utilising our tree house for experiences such as reading and learning to take turns going down the slippery slide. Outdoor play is an efficient key part to a child’s developmental growth. Physical skills are important for growth, physical coordination and the movement of the body. When our children play outdoors, they are learning to increase their ability to balance, jump, climb, throw, run and skip. While so they are utilising there imagination, creativity and learning to be spontaneous as they play without structure and freedom.
Just as morning tea arrived, we made our way indoors with our Choo-Choo train line for daily circle time and morning tea. As we sat down for circle time we first said our good mornings to all children that were present while marking the roll. Today we welcomed: Nayla, Luca, Parker, Henry, Toby, Zahra, Lachlan, Hunter, Lincoln, Alia, Tua, Isabelle, Hudson, Nikora, Rumi and Archie. For circle-time today Miss Aaliyah asked for the children to stand in one singular line to complete the “Candle stick” song. The purpose of this experience is for the children to one by one lightly jump over the “candle stick” and wash their hands for morning tea. The game begins with Miss Aaliyah singing the song whilst incorporating there names with the song. For eg: “Parker be nimble, Parker be quick! Parker jump over the candle stick”. Parker would then do a mini jump over the stick and wash his hands. This experience is efficient as it allows our children to hear aloud their own names along with their peers and learn about recognising their names/class peers. This is also an effective transitioning exercise that allows our students to socialise while moving from one task to another calmly.
As we completed our morning tea, we then participated in free play along with a name recognition experience as a follow-up from this morning’s circle time. Today Miss Aaliyah gathered a variety of blocks and had written the letters of the children’s name on each block, we called this experience “Building name blocks”. As a guide Miss Aaliyah wrote the child’s name on a white board for the children to look at when spelling their names with the blocks. With the help of Miss Aaliyah, the children would grab a block and hold the block up to the whiteboard with their name to help them spell. The children were very much intrigued and engaged with this experience that we even had a few attempt to write their own names. Recognising names is the first step in knowing who they are. Recognising our names communicates respect and helps them feel recognized as individuals. Our children were able to show a sense of independence as they were willing to write their own name out of interest and curiosity. While we had alphabet building with Miss Aaliyah, the children sat down with Miss Tayla to read stories, form puzzles and play with magnetic pieces.