Holy Family Preschool Reflection – Term 1/Week 4

Niina Marni to all our young learners and their beautiful families. We welcome you to yet another blog of our children’s wonderful learning experiences.

Learning Intention 1:

To support children’s engagement, development and self-regulation through strengthening their sensory processing capabilities.

Why?

Continuing on from the previous learning intention about positive education – sensory processing supports children to self-regulate and ground themselves.
Positive sensory input can support self-regulation.
Our senses collect information from the world around us, as well as our interactions within it. This information is then processed in our brain, forming the basis of our learning, wellbeing and secure interactions with others.

This week children have been engaging in multi-sensory experiences which stimulate their sensory systems of touch, sound, sight, and vestibular(movement). Children were given the opportunity to explore these senses by listening to music, playing with Oobleck/coloured uncooked pasta, and engaging in body-movement activities such as yoga and dancing.

When playing with the Oobleck, children had different ideas for its purposes.
Sylvia – “I’m making soup”
Alice – “Soup”
Soleia – “It’s like milk”

Children had a wonderful time doing yoga. Engaging in Yoga promotes flexibility, balance, strength, coordination and posture. Additionally, it improves body awareness and helps children to focus their attention on the present moment and on each part of their body, allowing them to redirect energy positively, helping them calm their minds and bodies.

In achieving our learning intention, we also introduced the children to the different emotions we feel. We talked about how we feel a range of emotions and that it is okay to feel them. We made happy, sad, surprised and scared faces together to identify what our facial expressions might look like, when we are feeling these emotions. Children then reflected on what they were feeling at the moment and picked the emoji that best described it. Our young learners were able to clearly articulate how they were feeling as well, which was impressive to see. Additionally, we read the book ‘When I’m feeling Angry’ and discussed that we all might feel angry for a variety of reasons, and that it is not wrong to feel angry, but it is wrong to hurt others when we are angry. With the use of the book, we discussed a few strategies that can be used to calm ourselves down such as counting, taking deep breaths, talking to someone we trust and finding a quiet space. Later when reflecting on these strategies, the children were able to recall them successfully.

Lawrence – “breathe in and out”
Soleia – “quiet space”
Joanna – “Talk to the teacher”

Learning Intention 2:

To challenge children’s construction skills using loose parts and STEM experiences by extending on their emergent interest and learning about cause and effect, comparison and problem-solving skills.

Why?

Loose Parts play encourages children to plan, create, problem-solve and think critically as they have no instructions and no predetermined rules.  It helps children to be imaginative.
Loose parts give children the freedom to arrange and rearrange, to create their own rules and designs, which allows the focus of the experience to be on the process rather than the product.

Children have shown a strong enthusiasm for construction play, designing a variety of structures such as buildings, animal enclosures, car parks, and castles this week. They demonstrated creativity and imagination in their creations, as well as remarkable perseverance when encountering challenges in their designs. It has been truly impressive to watch them adapt and modify their models, either to overcome obstacles or to bring their visions to life.

It’s been lovely listening to children’s conversations and engaging with them while they are busy with their creations.

Willow – “Its for people to see” (while placing animals in different enclosures)
“This one is for the crocodiles. This one is for the tigers. Let’s see how many animals we’ve got.”

Charlotte – “Its a motorbike” (while building with blocks)
Lawrence – “There’s a jail in there” (pointing to the same ‘motorbike’)

Learning Intention 3:

To understand that the Sign of the Cross is a prayer to God and sacred symbols are special and important.

Whilst continuing to sing our prayer song during our morning prayer time, we also learned to say a little prayer to God asking for His help to listen to our teachers, to do the right thing, to help others in need and to speak kind words. Children have been wonderful in repeating the prayer after their teachers and we are sure they will know the prayer by heart in no time.

Literacy Intention:

Build connections to picture books.

We have read many books throughout the week and discussed them with children. Additionally, following children’s interest in songs and rhymes, we have been reciting a variety of rhymes during our group times as they promote oral language development, children’s vocabulary and introduce children to early literacy skills like repetition, listening for syllables and rhyming words. We have also continued to sing the Jolly phonics songs with actions, which children love, and allowed for a multitude of opportunities for mark-making through painting, book-making, colouring and drawing.