Nina Marni Long Day Care B Families, welcome to our week 3 LDC B blog. This week we have continued with our learning intentions from last week. To allow children to learn and understanding these theories and create more opportunities for them to explore and learn.
Learning Intention: To support new children and families to develop a sense of belonging to LDC B’s environment and the Holy Family ELC community.
ILPS: SP, WN.SF, AF, LF, EP
Why:
- We believe children begin to learn about themselves and construct their own identity within the context of their families and communities. We view Alive as an important part of this community and believe we have a responsibility to create positive experiences that will support children’s deep understanding of themselves as significant and respected members and citizens of the world.
- In early childhood settings children develop a sense of belonging when they feel accepted, develop attachments and trust those that care for them. As children are developing their sense of identity, they explore different aspects of it (physical, social, emotional, spiritual, cognitive), through their play and their relationships.
For the first part of this term, we have been focusing on getting to know each child through one-to one time with each child, small group times and experiences and whole group interactions (from this we have gotten to the children very well both our new friends and friends who have been with us for a while). Physical movement, meal times together, our community walks and visual art provocations have been the stand outs that have really helped us as a team and community to achieve this intention.
Having the opportunity to learn more about each other. Gaining deeper relationships with one another and helping children to find their sense of agency and belonging in our learning space has created special moments for us as a room and we are so happy with how well the room has achieved this learning intention.
Below is our community visit timetable for this term ( as seen in last week’s blog) we have used and implemented this timetable for several weeks so far and have seen a successful result in both the children and our routine.
Our scheduled Community Visits this term are:
Monday: MUDLA and fish farm 12 to 12:30
Tuesday: Playground 12 to 12:30
Wednesday: Billabongs and library 12 to 12:30
Thursday: Oval and veggie garden 12 to 12:30
Friday: Assembly and log park 9 – 10am
Just a friendly reminder you will notice each child has a dedicated locker space in our learning environment as well as hooks outside for bags. If you arrive to our centre before one of the LDC B staff, please support your child to:
- Place bag in locker.
- Unpack drink bottle.
Learning Intention: To support the implementation and understanding of positive education practices and re-introduce the concept and language of ‘bucket filling’ and ‘specks of gold’.
ILPS: ALL
Why:
- Positive education is an approach to education that draws on positive psychology’s emphasis of individual strengths and personal motivation to promote learning.
- Positive psychology interventions include decision-making, coping skills, problem-solving skills, relaxation and creative brainstorming. Using these in positive education improves mental health and life satisfaction, reduces depression and anxiety and improves academic success and creative thinking.
- The fundamental goal of positive education is to promote flourishing or positive mental health within the school community.
- Positive education is the combination of traditional education principles with the study of happiness and wellbeing, using Martin Seligman’s PERMA model and the Values in Action (VIA) classification.
- PERMA encompasses five main elements that Seligman premised as critical for long-term wellbeing:
- Positive emotions: Feeling positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, interest, and hope.
- Engagement: Being fully absorbed in activities that use your skills but still challenge you
- (Positive) relationships: Having positive relationships.
- Meaning: Belonging to and serving something you believe is bigger than yourself
- Accomplishment: Pursuing success, winning, achievement, and mastery
As seen last week an intention for LDC B was to Bucket-filling. For those who may not have come across this term before. Bucket filling is used in education to refer to positive attitudes and behaviour. The analogy of this is that every person in our community carries with them an invisible bucket. This bucket contains a person’s feelings and emotions.’
Visual group times, our quiet space corner, our book making station and our speck of gold group time at the end of the day have really helped us in achieving this intention. These provocations and experiences helped us to enable children to understand what areas and things may empty a child’s induvial bucket as well as others. We also discussed ways we can fill our buckets back up and what emotions we feel during these moments.
Having conversations with children about ‘big emotions ‘is important and something we at Holy Family advocate for. We want children to know it is completely normal to have these emotions and it is okay to express them too.
The children have taken to this topic well and the strategies we have started to implant have worked well also. This is something that we want to keep in our room as an everyday practice and will be working more and more on for the rest of the term.
The LDC B children have really grasped this theory well and have used it in times both when their buckets are full and when they are empty. We incredibly proud of them and this definitely filled our buckets.
Another friendly reminder that if you ever need to contact a LDC B staff for a chat and haven’t been able to see us at drop off or pick up you can always email.
*New LDC B families you can also send in your family photos for our Kinship tree too*