We had a busy Term 1 and our Kindy students have done lots of learning. In March, we celebrated Harmony Week by learning about a different country each day of the week. The five countries we chose were the top five countries our children’s families come from. We learnt about New Zealand, and we watched poi poi dancers and played with poi poi’s donated by Mrs Tania Murray. For England, we made trifle and played hopscotch. For South Africa, we made Hertzoggies; these were really yummy and easy to make. We learnt about African dress and culture. We also made a Greek Semolina cake.
This Term, we have become eco-warriors by cleaning up the rubbish in our nature play area and in our yard. This started when we went to nature play for clean-up Australia day. Now every time we go back to nature play, we have to bring a rubbish bag and gloves as there is always lots of our friends wanting to clean up after the big kids. This led to world ocean day, where we looked at how rubbish gets into our oceans and how it affects the fish that live in the ocean. We also talked about what we could do to help. The children’s ideas were to pick up rubbish and encourage others to do the same.
In literacy, we have been doing lots of work developing our speaking skills and stepping out simple sentences. We have lots of opportunities for the children to share their ideas and news, and there is always time for lots of questions. We also jump out simple sentences like my favourite colour is…. With each word in the sentence, the children jump into a hula hoop. We looked at recognising syllables in words. The children love tapping out syllables, and some days most of the words they spoke were tapped out into syllables.
In numeracy this Term, we have been learning about measurement terms like big, small, tall, short etc. We had a height chart in our room where the children compared their heights to find out who was the tallest and shortest. This then led to measuring other parts of our body like arms and legs. Which finally led to the creation of a life-size body of ourselves. When it came to creating a face for our person we talked about feelings, we looked in the mirror and chose an emotion to draw on our face. We talked about all our facial features and how they change when we feel different emotions.
We have been doing lots of work on numbers. We have been practicing our counting, learning how to recognise how many dots without counting and matching the number. We have enjoyed playing many games to help develop our skills like dice games, ice-cream match and creating our own numbered carpark.
Our lovely Koorlongka children love cars, trucks, and construction vehicles. We used this strong interest to drive our learning areas and our intentional teaching. We incorporated shape learning through providing straight roads and curvy roads that the children could construct into shapes. We also ventured outside on shape hunts and used the photos we took to make shape posters. We also incorporated letter recognition and IT discovery through setting up an office area. The children were encouraged to type their name using the iPad. They also had the opportunity to draw pre-writing patterns and write their names on the iPad using paint. This led to other fun name creating activities like creating their own Easter name puzzle, finding the letters in their names, cutting them out and gluing them in the right order etc.
To finish off the Term and to give the children a break, we had a fun school holiday program. We do a fun-filled themed day for every day of the holidays. Some of the children’s favourite ones were Dinosaur day, Superhero day and Camping Day. Now term two has just begun, and we look forward to more fun learning discoveries to venture on with our Koorlongka children.
Mrs Ralph
Koorlongka Kindy Teacher
