LDC B Weekly Blog – Term 2 Week 8 2023

Learning Intention 1: To Establish Berry Street Principles within our room, focusing on developing self-regulation skills and positive disposition

Teachers and some educators undertook training in Berry Street at the beginning of this term and have had the opportunity to develop deeper understandings of the importance of wellbeing in a child’s learning.

As a team we have established immediate points that we would like to start implanting or use more of in our community for each child’s individual holistic development.

Holy Family follows the Berry Street Model, following on from this we believe this it is really important that we begin to lay the foundations to maximise the opportunities for children throughout their learning.

Some of the Berry Street Principles include: 

Our focus points that we will be focusing on –

• Being able to recognise the importance of  the mental state and perceptions of the child.
• Acknowledge each child’s ability to build social networks of support, feel confident as learners, and manage the challenging emotions that will arise when facing the unknown.
• BSEM (Berry Street Education Model) strengthens the art of teaching. Recognising the importance of every relationship and the mental and emotional states of complete engagement.This week we trailed and implemented ‘checking in’ each morning for our morning group time. Doing this gave out team the chance to see what children won’t feeling great that day and to make sure to check in with them once circle time is over throughout the day.Creating the opportunity to understand what each child is feeling and discussing with them that it is okay to feel these emotions and create a better understanding of  all the children’s sense of agency, needs and sense of feeling supported and finding their belonging.

  We have also supported staff with knowledge we gained through these training sessions to begin practice and approach relationships with children – on how to support them through difficult feelings and times of stress.

  Some of the experiences and provocations used to support this intention are: 

• Sensory provocations
• Walks and talks
• Resting this ( time by ourselves or with educators if they choose too)
• Reading books in regards to emotions
• Group times around emotions
• Visual emotion boards that children were able to use visually to show and represent what emotions they were feeling
• Community walks

We hope that this continues and begins to be a natural approach in our practice, building on these strategies with more learning intentions for the rest of the term.

Learning Intention 2: To start our first inquiry about communities and finding our sense of belonging with each child’s identity through connecting with and learning about the communities around them.

Over the last few weeks our room have been focusing on our sense of belonging and where we find this  often this is from different communities and places – the two main spaces we have focused on our families and our learning environment as a community.

Children have been invited to share family photos at group time after staff introduced their special in group of people to our room. These have been very special moments and certainly specks of gold this week.

As children have been sharing and taking interest in other peoples families and how everyones look a bit different. We have also used these photos to create and start our kinship tree.

Having this inquiry and intention of belonging has benefited the children in so many different ways ( especially our new friends that we have welcomed into our room the last few weeks). Creating a safe space for our children to grow and learn in is something that we at HF Preschool believe in highly. Having implementing and creating an environment suited to all children’s needs is something we have gained and know the importance of.

Some focus provocations and spontaneous experiences that helped us achieve this intention this week was:

• Having a special visit from our beloved Strawberry ( our pre school turtle)
• Looking at photos of our community and seeing familiar faces and memories we have created together
• Grouptimes
• Morning prayer time
• Meal times together
• Story times

Spotlight Term 2: Starting our spotlight for term 2 of with booking making asking questions like What’s your book about?’ – supporting children to choose Themes for their stories. Following on with language.

Focusing on our spotlight for term 2 of book making. This week we focused on working with the children about choosing a theme for their books. Asking questions like

• What is your book about?
• Could you tell me more about your story on the next page?
• Do you need help coming up with and idea of your book?

After reading our stories together. Children were encouraged to discuss together what they think of the book and how it relates to them. Whether it was their own feelings and emotions about familiar experiences and memories or if they liked the story or not.

Tyler – This is really funny I love Macka

Philip – This is him being sad, but Philip is happy

Elijah – Millie can we read Macka

Hannah – Lets read it together again Millie

Some strategies we have used to help with our spotlight this week is

• Story telling – focusing on our emotion books and our author study Matt Cosgrove
• Reading picture books regularly.
• Creating stories in small group experiences.
• Book making station always on offer.
• Draw on purpose.

We also had a very special visit from Lisa Burman this week on Friday and got to create some amazing books with her. Some of us also did our very first book with writing on it! A very proud moment for our team.

Trajectories:

• To support children’s expression of ideas and identity through mark-making and collaborative art experiences.
• Sensory provocations
• Walks in the school community
• Set provocations for exploration of emotions
• Book making – supporting children to create themes and topics and introducing publishing