New beginnings
And just like that another new year begins at kindy! What an exciting first few weeks it’s been.
New Beginnings in the Snakes room with new routines, new friends and new room leader.
I nurtured your babies in the Little Fish room and I’m thrilled to be apart of their developmental journey, once again. I am teamed with the lovable Miss Coby, which the children just adore. We’re off to a good start.
Just to refresh you on the unique programs we offer apart from the National Curriculum:
- ‘Mindful Kids’ resilience;
- ‘Empowering Our Youth’ Indigenous inspired; and
- ‘Bush Kindy’ Nature Inspired programs are off to a strong start.
I will share each of these programs in more depth, over the next few months.
In this blog, I also talk about the significance of Mat time, our teaching methods and the importance of pre prep readiness.
Research shows that children who start school when developmentally ready to learn tend to do better in school – and it sets them up for further success later in life. I talk about this more later in the blog.
Mat Time
Daily Group time on the mat is our opportunity to LEARN ( Listen, Engage, Ask questions, Reflect and Navigate). Not just for the children but for us as educators as well.
Talking and listening to our Jom-gwongs (snakes) at the group time allows us to play a pivotal role as co-learner, facilitator, observer and extend on the children’s interests.
Repetitive predicted routines instill a sense of belonging and confidence in children because they can predict what is coming up next. We incorporate into this routine our morning greetings, sing our ‘Growth Mindset’ song and recite our ‘Acknowledgement of country’ before we move onto weather and calendar knowledge.
Creating a safe learning environment is a high value for us. Every child learns at a different pace and in different ways. We ensure every child feels a sense of being and becoming and are encouraged to GIVE IT A GO! It is something you’ll hear a lot in our room. Making mistakes is part of the learning process.
Story time brings our listening skills to the forefront, the ability to sit still and pay attention. Something that is important at this age, in readiness for pre-prep.
Singing is an all time favourite with our little friends, so we do a lot of that in our way of teaching.
Counting and colours by enagement. One way children consolidate information is by involving them. We play games with numbers and colours by asking children to count their peers and count how many people are wearing a certain colour. You get the picture. The ideas are endless.
Learning made fun
As adults, we know that lemons taste sour, that flowers are fragrant and that hugs feel good. How do we know this? Definitely not something you’ll find in a book. We know these things because we’ve experienced them with our senses. In the same way, children learn about the world by experiencing things through their senses.
With this as our main motivational drive for our learning experiences the children learn through play. The benefits of learning through play are:
- Problem solving;
- language development;
- sensory skills;
- communication skills; and
- learning cause and effect
Witnessing the children free play, we observed that lot of our little friends showed great interest towards the transportation toys.
What better activity to combine senses and the love of transport than a carwash?! oh Yes! first lesson of the year and we are getting down and dirty in the dirt pit in the environmental yard.
The children burst with enthusiasm driving their trucks through the dirt and mud then washing them in the big blue tub afterwards, just like a carwash. Except the clear water turned brown….. lots of conversational, language opportunities on what they could see, feel and different sensations and the cause and effect of washing to make something clean. Sensory skills were in overdrive and an experience the children will be able to convey about their day.
Pre-prep readiness
‘School readiness’ is a measure of the knowledge, skills and behaviours that enable children to participate and succeed in school.
A parental misconception is the belief that school readiness is being able to read, write and do basic math’s before starting school. But this isn’t the case!
School readiness is about the development of the whole child – their social and emotional skills, physical skills, communication skills and cognitive skills.
Children cannot thrive at school if they haven’t developed the skills to manage things like getting along with other children, following instructions, and communicating their needs.
It starts in the Snakes room. Preparing our children for pre-prep by focusing on resilience and their developmental skills by providing them a wide range of activities.
We are currently working on:
- Harnessing resilience by understanding Feelings and emotions;
- Capacity to deal with change and adversity;
- Pencil grip skills;
- Scissor skills;
- Pincer grip skill;,
- Letter awareness;
- Numbers;
- Shapes;
- Colours; and
- Measuring skills.
Please leave us a comment if you would like to know more about anything in particular.
That’s all for this month from Miss Roshin, Miss Coby and our Jom-gwong friends.
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