Dear Parents and Friend's,
Welcome to our weekly brief for week 7. We are excited to share with you highlights of our weekly experiences.
To promote creativity and dexterity, the children were provided opportunities to use Playdough. The children enjoy creating a variety of shapes using numerous techniques and aids. They begin to develop spacial awareness as they work with the playdough making it large enough to be able to use different sized cutters. They often hypothesise when the playdough does not quite fill in a shaped template, rolling the playdough out a little more to gain that extra size required. They are working and developing all those important finger muscles as they kneed the playdough, manipulate shapes and pressing out shapes required to correctly hold writing implements for extended durations.
Our outdoor play equipment continues to provide the children with opportunities to develop strength, balance and co-ordination. As the children's strength develops and confidence builds, the children explore opportunities where they can take increased risk in their play. The Monkey Bars are a favourite and used in a variety of ways. We have the traditional use for those starting to develop the required strength to hold their own body weight and for the more confident, "Increased Risk" by hanging upside down with the use of their legs only. For our adventures summit seekers, they choose to explore a path to the top of the monkey bars where they can enjoy a well earned break by sitting on top of the monkey bars appreciating the views around them. The increased risks taken are an essential part of the children's problem solving skills and development of their confidence.
The Butterfly children have an initiate ability of transforming even the most sedate play equipment ie the Wobbly Bridge into a fun and challenging apparatus through increased risk by balancing across, between and in between the handrails. Even the crawling barrels used to assist our younger friends coordination, balance and strength, our Butterfly Students found a way to make a little more interesting. The challenge was to find a "manageable" risk and to conquer that risk. Easy, lets sit on top of the barrels and ball without sliding off ..... definitely more fun!!
You will be pleased to know that not all our outdoor play is risk based. We also enjoy skill based challenges like throwing and catching balls developing our hand eye coordination as we learn game rules and develop our ability to regulate our behaviour when we don't succeed at first building our tenacity as we continue to persevere. Barrel basketball was another favourite ball game. And yes, the children found another way of introducing an element of risk to barrel basketball by hooting hoops as they slid down a slippery dip avoiding grazing themselves on the pavers when landing.
Even our Pallet had a purpose in the children's play this week. The objective was to avoid the risk of landing in the gaps between the slats as the children walked, hopped and jumped along the slats.
The children were also able to show case their creative side as well. Extending from barrel basketball, the children developed their own basketball game using stepping stones and the hand held bean bags. It is quite impressive to witness children taking what they learn and apply it to a different context.
The children enjoyed learning about the characteristics of Magnetic attraction and repulsion resulting when combining similar and opposite magnetic poles. Once they mastered this magnetic behaviour, they where able to experiment designing and creating products by combining different shapes, both horizontally and vertically up the metal fence, as they continue experimenting with the attraction of opposite poles and repulsion of similar poles.
The children also enjoyed emulating their teachers taking photos of their work by taking their own Photos of their educators and peer's work. The children were able to differentiate between the front and back, of the camera, taking photos using the correct orientation.
The children always enjoy showcasing their athletic ability to the teachers and peers. We were privileged to witness our Gymnasts demonstrate the splits and cartwheels. Cant wait to see what will be in next weeks repertoire.
The children always enjoy our daily grouptime. We It's an excellent opportunity to participate in discussions, sing songs, work on our dance moves. We are currently learning about colours so enjoyed listening to our story on colours and our discussion about colours as we build our vocabulary, extend on our memory recall and comprehension.
The children were presented with an opportunity to further extend on their ability to read emotional cues and reflect on their meaning and the role we can play as friends in these various situations as they worked through an emotion puzzle matching game.
The Doll Houses and Dolls are always a popular activity encouraging the children to showcase their understanding of society norms as they make sense of their world. It's an excellent way to expose children to a variety of cultures providing them with an opportunity to reflect on differences which exist and how we can be inclusive by our actions and words.
We even had a little Technology out to observe the children's recognition of the various platforms and their correct use. It was pleasing to see our Butterflies mentor their younger peers on the correct use of technology.
Our Reptile Park provided the children with an appreciation for the danger of poisonous snakes. Where to apply a tourniquet if we are bitten and to call 000.
Our initial assessments commenced this week. The purpose of the initial assessment is to establish a baseline of the children's current knowledge and abilities to determine goals for the year and assist with curriculum planning.
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