Nina Marni – Nǐn hǎo – Selamat siang – Namaste – Ya su – Hola – Bonjour
This week at Holy Family Preschool we celebrated Harmony Week.
Harmony week is the celebration that recognises our diversity and brings together Australia’s front all different backgrounds.
It is about inclusiveness, respects and a sense of belonging for everyone.
Holy Family welcomes many families from across the world who chose Adelaide to be their home. We are a large multicultural community who cherishes everyone’s individual diversity and differences.
Orange is the colour chosen to represent Harmony Week. Traditionally, orange signifies social communication and meaningful conversations. It also relates to the freedom of ideas and encouragement of mutual respect. During the week the children engaged in a range of orange themed activities. Including an orange slimy spaghetti, orange play dough, and rainbow rice. Angela also used her wonderful imagination to cook orange cakes for the children and made yummy pumpkin soup. We gathered together with the ED4 and ED3 to share our afternoon teas as one big Holy Family Early Learning Community.
On Friday, we invited our educators and children to come to Preschool dressed in their own cultural clothing, or orange clothes. We were able to celebrate together as a big community our individual diversity. It was beautiful to see the children and educators dress up!
Week 8’s learning intention was to nurture each child’s and educators identity through connection with and learning about their culture and community. This links with this week being Harmony Week. The children are continuing to develop strong senses of identity and building great and diverse friendships.
This week we have continued to engage children in bookmaking processes. On the weekend, Estelle and myself attended a Lisa Burman bookmaking workshop, and with our new knowledge are able to further this bookmaking experience for the children. We continue our literacy focus on the idea that ‘people make books and you can too’. We have been reading books more actively to children and showing them books we have written to inspire them to create their own. During our read-aloud we have been showing children images of the author to reinforce the concept that authors are just like us. We have also focus on ‘mark-making’, this is the process of creating marks on a page. This then leads to forming letter, then words, then sentences.
Children have been developing their sense of identity further this week by drawing self-portraits. This requires the children to notice their own individual features and what makes them different from their friends. Next term we will revisit self-portraits to see the development the children have made in their drawing skills and how they see themselves.
This week we received a delivery of new furniture for the Preschool. This meant we had lots of BIG boxes. The children used this opportunity to explore and play.
Have a great weekend and we are excited to extending you child’s learning further in Week 9!
The Preschool Team
(Farah, Estelle, Christina, Ranjan, Jasmeet, Louise)