Nina Marni little learners and their beautiful families. Welcome to our weekly blog.
Our learning intentions for this week will be a repeat from the last fortnight due to continuing interests of the children.
Learning Intention 1: To continue to develop children’s cutting and pasting skills using a range of natural and manmade materials.
Why
- Cutting and pasting activities for children in Early Learning have many benefits. For example, cutting and pasting can help the development of fine motor skills. They can cut images, shapes and drawings and paste them into various shapes
- Cutting and pasting activities can also be used as creative channels for children’s
self-expression.
- Cutting and pasting is an important first skill to master for children to then be able to design, ideate and successfully create artwork and objects.
- Cutting and pasting is a necessary skill for many school-based activities and will support school preparedness for children.
An intentional cutting and pasting table set up in the room everyday so support consistency, predictability and development of this skill
- Use of different types of scissors to support inclusion of all children
- Use of various types of joining materials such as; glue sticks, (with appropriate supervision), sticky tape, masking tape etc
- Use of collected natural materials from community walks
- Use of collected recyclable materials provided by staff and families
- Pattern making with shapes and different materials
- Discussion about aspects of visual art such as line, texture, shape and pattern
This week children continued to engage in their scissor cutting skills using a variety of natural and manmade resources along with gluing their cuttings into making some wonderful and amazing collages.
Learning Intention 2
Sacred symbols
Sacred symbols are special and important.
Why :
Doctrinal Insights from the Catholic Tradition that support this Enduring Understanding include:
- Sacred symbols remind us that God is close to us, and with us.
- In my Catholic learning environment, I can see many sacred symbols.
- Candle flames remind us that God is with us.
- The Bible reminds us of God’s love for us through special stories.
- The Cross reminds us of Jesus.
- Water is used for special blessings
- Sacred symbols are used in my school/ELC and in church celebrations, prayer and liturgy. (CCC1145)
- Other faith traditions also have sacred symbols.
Doctrinal Insights from the Catholic Tradition that support this Enduring Understanding include:
- Sacred symbols remind us that God is close to us, and with us.
- In my Catholic learning environment, I can see many sacred symbols.
- Candle flames remind us that God is with us.
- The Bible reminds us of God’s love for us through special stories.
- The Cross reminds us of Jesus.
- Water is used for special blessings
- Sacred symbols are used in my school/ELC and in church celebrations, prayer and liturgy. (CCC1145)
- Other faith traditions also have sacred symbols.
Throughout this week children have been very enthusiastic and keen to join in our morning group time where we begin our day with a heartfelt prayer. Children have been inclusive in setting up our prayer table placing the sacred symbols and picking a flower from our school garden or using the wooden cross to communicate their prayer of thansgiving to Jesus. As our liturgical calendar will be commencing the season of advent very soon (Christmas) the teacher’s have been preparing the children of what to expect throughout the weeks to come as a lead up to the season of advent, a change in our prayer table and the sacred symbols.
Book Making – Literacy Intentions (Our hopes for their learning)
- Reading picture books regularly.
- Children will enjoy a joyful connection to picture books.
- Continue using mark-making tools, such as crayons, texter’s, pencils, paint, chalk, sand (as they create texts during this process).
- Children will build symbolic functioning, sharing something about the marks they have created.
- Bookmaking ongoing throughout the term
The writers workshop and the literacy station has been a one stop shop where the children have been continuously engaged with story telling, collaboratively and interactively using lots of verbal communication. We even managed to roll out our writers workshop over at the MUDLA during one of our community visits and these beautiful authors have been hard at work creating, marking their books being their very confident authors.
The daily routine flow chart Now , then and after has been very consistent throughout the learning space. Children have been able to predict what to expect next in their learning throughout the day. Children have been inclusive in picking up the flash cards to put up on the chart throughout every transition of the day.
Community visits around the Holy Family Catholic School this week have been very much regular where the children have been able to access the fruit and vegetable garden , the playground the MUDLA and the log park to extend on their learning , building interactions and communication with their peers. This morning the children picked some strawberries and some cherry tomatoes from the garden and handed them over to Angela in the kitchen to be consumed during meal times.
Some specs of gold for this week
Hope you all have a relaxing weekend.