As a teacher, I intentionally create a positive and safe learning environment because in my experience, children who are immersed in that kind of environment are more motivated, engaged, and have a higher overall learning ability. By providing plenty of learning opportunities, and getting down to the child’s level to observe, listen and learn together as a team, allows me to cater for all individual needs and learning areas.
While no two children develop on the exact same timeline, there are sensitive time periods in which major developmental milestones are reached.
The Basic Plan
At the beginning of the year the children realised just what a big step into pre prep room really was, even though the Snakes room prepared them emotionally, socially and intellectually. This program starts with getting to know the children, their current skills and abilities and creating a basic plan towards numeracy, literacy, stem, gross motor and self help independence. The children experienced:
- Creating new goals;
- Learning opportunities; and
- Developmental challenges.
Progress In Action
Now six months into our year, the children can confidently take on the challenge with a stricter routine, and are developing a more in-depth outcome into their milestone development.
The children have been given the tools to use their current skills and interests as a basis for learning, along side the week to week pre prep planning, which has shown through their many achieved goals and positive outcomes as explored below.
This is allowing the opportunity to easily further their school readiness learning experience for the next six months.
Developing social skills
In this age group, children learn how to:
- Share and cooperate;
- Work together and take turns;
- Participate in group activities;
- Follow simple directions; and
- Communicate wants and needs through planned and play based learning opportunities.
We extend this learning into our program by teaching about our emotions and human nature. We harness this by expressing our feelings verbally or through our resilience tools, listening, showing compassion for each other and reading our non-verbal ques of facial expressions and body language.
Being generous, thoughtful, helpful and sharing is something that is learnt by witnessing what it looks like. How do we be generous with our time and belongings, thoughtful and helpful to others? At this age… it’s through creative role play, intentional social engagement games, fantasy puppetry plays and social conversation during meals, group times and free play exploring.
Intellectual development Is how children organise their thoughts and ideas to make sense of the world they live in.
How do we extend this development? We facilitate it through the children’s decision making, attention memory, language abilities, learning and perception skills. As pre prep children play and use their imaginations they generate ideas. They use their creative skills to find different solutions for solving a problem.
During our day we explore these skills by having multiple opportunities to understand:
- Counting and number sequencing – with group times and one on one table activities.
- Understanding the concept of time – by having a structured daily routine.
- Connecting colours and textures – with art experiences.
- Following instructions – with 2-3 steps.
- Effective Communication – by encouraging children to openly discuss how they feel and negotiate what they want.
- Self awareness – noticing themselves through emotional understanding and management and body awareness. This is facilitated through our Mindful Kids program and discussions about genders, family settings, and weekend stories.
In A Home Setting
Communication can be exciting at home with simple songs and rhymes. Make learning fun changing up words or sounds, for your child to distinguish and correct.
Explore their development with games and interactions such as: *Playing eye spy *Cooking together *Read a variety of books together (picture, pop up, information and even poetry)
Motor skills
Working on gross motor skills helps a child gain strength and confidence in their body.
Developing skills of balance, strength, muscle tone, agility, attention span, body stability, postural control, eye-hand and eye-foot coordination, as well as an understanding of position in space.
Fine Motor skills however, are important because little hands need to develop dexterity and strength, in order to write, dress themselves and feed themselves.
Gross Motor Outdoors
Over the past six months the children have thrived in yard play, developing many skills and abilities. To achieve a high-quality outcome, we have been discovering ways to move our body’s and explore fun in interesting ways such as:
- Follow the leader – understanding of position in space and attention span.
- Bike and scooter skills – on our bike track observing for stop signs and pedestrians (balance, muscle tone and agility, postural control and awareness of their environment).
- Climbing wall and forts (core and upper body strength, balance, leg strengthening).
- Ball skills – taking our time to throw, catch and roll sensibly ( hand-eye coordination).
- Group games – parachute play, tunnel ball, hopscotch, walking on lines, simon says and balloon toss.
Many games of which can be played at home with you, to develop coordination, increase attention span and support cognition in your child.
Fine Motor Skills
We encourage these actions in the pre prep class by practicing
- Pincer grasp (using just the thumb and one finger to pick something up);
- Hand-eye coordination (coordinating small movements in conjunction with their eyes);
- Hand and finger strength (to manipulate and grip objects); and
- Two-handed tasks (coordinating the use of both hands together).
Over the past six months we have been developing these skills with a variety planned activities such as manipulating tweezers, rolling and squashing play dough and other sensory objects, building and construction with the many different blocks and magnet sets, and letter practicing with many different writing materials such as white boards/markers, coloured pencils and chalk.
We have spent time focusing on our scissor skills and hand coordination which can be followed through and focused on towards box construction moments and creative play.
Continue to grow your child’s fine motor development with *Puppet play *Putting together simple puzzles *Interacting in board games *Opening and closing things (latches, lids, boxes) *Eating with silverware.
Empowering Our Youth
The ‘Empowering our Youth’ program is embedded in our curriculum and modified to every age group. We invest in children our cultural knowledge of our native heritage. Our vision is a journey of living, breathing and walking together to bridge the gap.
We begin each day by earthing ourselves in our intention built environmental yard and proudly reciting our ‘Acknowledgment of Country’, before we head inside for group time learning.
We embrace our culture by:
- Learning basic words and counting in the Yugambeh language;
- Using Traditional art techniques – Dot paintings, x-ray art, and cross hatching techniques;
- Exploring and tracking Aboriginal symbols;
- Movement, dance and instruments; and
- Storytelling
Apart from our ‘Empowering Our Youth’, aboriginal inspired program, we Celebrate and explore multiculturalism. Australia is made up of many different backgrounds, religions, beliefs and traditions that we proudly recognise in many different ways.
In the past few months, we have celebrated;
- Harmony Day by placing each child’s hand print in the colour orange, onto one large piece of paper to signify that we all belong.
- Chinese New Year by discussing the year of the Tiger and what the colour red represents. (wealth, fame and prosperity) The children worked together to make red Chinese lanterns and hung up to encourage good fortune.
- NAIDOC Week by extending on the children’s learning with traditional symbols, music, dancing and dreamtime stories.
Mindful Kids
Building resilience in children helps them to overcome obstacles more easily and reduces the chances of them suffering from anxiety or other stress-related disorders. In our pre prep class room we look at resilience as the ability to cope with, and adapt to, stress brought on by a difficult life event. Some children develop resilience through natural process, while others require assistance.
The pre prep children are encouraged and supported through difficult days by introducing yoga opportunities, daily meditation moments with self-reflection, and a quiet area set in the room where the children can feely express themselves with many displayed resources to let the children Stop, Breathe, Squeeze and finally Communicate their feelings.
Bush Kindy
Each week we take the opportunity to explore and research our beautiful space around us. We focus on different subjects in nature as it fosters good development in our children, mentally, socially and physically and is the ultimate sensory experience for them. Through playing in nature and having the freedom to explore their world, we help our children learn to care for their environment and one another.
The pre prep children have thrived over the past six months, exploring a number of subject, such as;
- Researching a lizards habitat and behaviours.
- Creating interactive grounding experiences for the children to connect with mother earth and explore all their sensors.
- Breathing in the fresh air in the environmental space and further explore different natural materials such as dirt, sand, bark and timber.
- Investigating honey bees and the way these amazing insects collect nectar and create honey.
- Exploring Australian native trees that produce bush tucker foods that we eat form our kitchen.
- Discussions about our ocean and beach environment, followed up by conducting ideas from our parent input with sandcastle lessons, shell in natural clay prints and fishing rod building.
Remember, all kids truly need in the early years of their development is a safe space to explore the world around them, and a caring adult to help them along the way!
That’s all for this month from Miss Tracy and the Pingin (Sea Turtle) Children
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