Term 2 has been so busy finishing off our learning projects for the Semester and sending out progress reports. Kindys were sent out as a learning story on Educa and pre-kindys are under the milestones section on Educa. Camping and cooking were big interests of the children for this Term. This stemmed from many of our children going camping with their families on the holidays. We started to look into healthy eating and looking at how to take care of our bodies.

We made healthy eating charts and tried some new fruits and vegetables and looked at what coloured food is good for what parts of our body. This also lead to cooking some delicious minestrone soup for our lunch. It was wonderful to see the children trying new vegetables in the soup because they cut up the vegetables and helped make the soup, they were more motivated to eat it.

We have been doing lots of team games and activities that encourage us to work together and support each other. Tunnel ball, over and under and crossing the river are some of our favourite ones. We have learnt to support each other through using encouraging words and learning to wait for our turn in the game. This linked in well with the theme in our bible study (Think orange program). We have been looking at the fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control). These were great relatable reminders for the children each week to work on and show in the room through teacher role modelling.

This Term we had visits from student teachers, Mrs Edwards and Miss Beth. Mrs Edwards taught us lots on number and rhyming. She had lots of fun interactive games for us to play. Our favourite was spinning the number wheel on the computer and feeding the monsters. This helped develop our number recognition and subitising skills (knowing how many are there without the need to count). She also helped set up an amazing puppet theatre. We got to make our own puppets and act out different feelings or how to share or play with our friends etc. Miss Beth did some amazing sustainability activities with us. We looked at how pollution affects our animals and sea creatures. This lead us to think about what we can do to help our environment.

Mrs Perret-Knight has done lots of work with us, looking at the seasons and how our environment changes. The children have noticed the biggest change when looking at the leaves and the trees we have in our environment. There were lots of questions and inquiries about why the pomegranates have all gone and why are the leaves turning brown and falling off the trees to why are all the leaves gone is it dead? We linked this learning into our NAIDOC studies by comparing our seasons with the Noongar seasons. There are six seasons compared to four. We also are doing a welcome to country every morning acknowledging the owners of the land.

We ended Term 2 with a great school holiday program. The children loved the pyjama and movie day and this time we had some warm hot chocolate to enjoy with the popcorn on our cold winter days. Pyjama day followed the next week so we did this day two more times so everyone had a chance to enjoy this day. Other fun days the children enjoyed were bugs day and the hospital day which we have continued these interests into our learning for Term 3. Another highlight of the holidays was the market day. The children felt so special going to the shops and buying their afternoon tea for the day.

Term 3 started with an excellent bee incursion. The children have been learning so much about bees in the lead up to this day and were so engaged in the presentation. Luke the beekeeper came and showed us a beehive and all the components and tools that go with it. Three small group activities followed his talk and the favourite one was the honey tasting. The children’s interest in bugs is still continuing into term three where we have gone on bug hunts and created our own bug discovery tray. Here we collected natural things that bugs like to hide in. We will use this to begin our learning on locational words.

In literacy, we have started to learn about letters. We are learning the letter sounds and looking at how our mouth moves when we make the different sounds. The children are enjoying singing the little rhymes like sausages are sizzling sss and learning the actions which help them remember. We have also loved practicing writing the letters by writing them in the sand with our fingers or writing our names on the whiteboard table.

In numeracy, we have done lots of work with patterns. We started off by finding them in nature before we had a go at creating simple ABAB patterns then moved on to more complex ones like ABBABB or adding more colours. We used paints, blocks, beads, and cut-up paper to show our understanding through play. 

We have been working on our cutting skills. The children have been showing great scissor control and grip and have loved making lots of scrap pieces for us to use with our pattern creations. We have been doing straight line cutting, curvy line cutting and cutting out pictures.

Dental week concluded our learning about healthy eating and looking after our bodies. We learnt about how to take care of our teeth by brushing them twice a day and eating healthy foods. We learnt what lots of sugary foods can do to your teeth. The children loved pretending to be dentists and demonstrating what they have learnt through our role-play dentist area.

What a busy term and a half we have had. We look forward to continuing our bug interest through the rest of Term 3.

Mrs Ralph – Kindy Teacher