Dear Family and Friends,
Welcome to our weekly update for week 17.
During this week’s group time we resume our focus on learning our alphabet, now concentrating on the letters S, T and U. The children are learning to visually recognise the letters of the week, listen to and repeat the phonics of the letters and recognise sight words beginning with these letters as they continue expand their vocabulary.
The children are presented with many opportunities to practice writing the letter we are learning. Their tracing is improving as their finger strength and dexterity improves enabling them to hold a pencil for longer periods without tiring. Keep up the great work Butterflies.
With the children’s interest of Dolls and Doll Houses and construction, the children were presented with a specific construction challenge to extend on the combination of both interests. They had to assist build a Doll House.
This involved learning about design/construction plans, bill of materials i.e. all the parts required for the construction, conducting an audit of the parts prior to starting to ensure there are no missing pieces which may affect the completion of the build. Determine the tools required to perform the build.
Now the fun part, the build. The children collectively worked together to ensure we had all the required parts for the build and then followed the step by step approach to perform the build. Once complete, became a very popular activity for the week.
A range of construction-based activities were selected by the children during the week. The most popular were Mobilo and Train track construction.
The children’s emerging love for literature is increasingly being displayed. Children will now often choose to read instead of engaging in traditional “object and representation” based activities.
Puzzles helped quench the thirst of the children to solve problems, whilst button threading allowed children who felt creative and artistic to design and make jewellery. For those wishing to extend their own literature learning, they conducted their own alphabet recognition and vocabulary building activity using magnetic letters on the whiteboard.
The children enjoyed our African savanna. Learning what animals live in an African savanna and what a savanna is. We also learnt where in Africa the savanna is located. Then the wheels fell off when they learnt other major savannas are located in South America, India and northern Australia.
Our sandpit was an excavating site and kitchen for most of the time, but occasionally a gold mine where children were found sieving for treasure. Sorry to report, no treasure found……yet!!
Our ever-popular outdoor play equipment provided our Ninja warriors hours of strength, coordination and balance-based experiences. And yes, we continue to find ways of making the most sedentary activity into an exhilarating risk filled experience….lets see how quickly I can rise and drop on this seesaw without holding on……easy, what’s next?