Xin chào ( Hello ) Families,
Welcome to our week 3 and 4 Blog!
Learning Intention 1: To encourage children to consider the safety and wellbeing of themselves and those around them, creating an inclusive and respectful learning environment.
Why:
- Children who have opportunities to effectively assess and manage risk at an early age will be better equipped to deal with risk as an adult. It also creates a learning environment where children can identify their limits, seek help when need, and supports children to explore, experiment and cope with the unexpected
- To support children’s understanding of God’s love and how we can embrace his teachings.
- Inclusive education recognises the right of every child and young person – without exception – to be included in general education settings. It involves adapting the environment and teaching approaches to ensure genuine and valued full participation of all children and young people.
- Recently educators have noticed many children seeking additional physical challenges within our environment. We aim to ensure that children are taking ownership over their safety as well ensure that that all educators are using consistent strategies.
- There are many benefits to children participating in decision making, such as learning to consider the needs of others, developing problem-solving skills and it can increase their commitment to making decisions work.
ILP’s: ALL
Teacher scaffolded learning:
- Community helpers: encouraging children to take ownership and pride over our community and enabling moments of regulation (one-to-one) interactions.
- Shared Reading: One Hundred Languages
- Discussions around feelings, differences, acceptance, respect
- Ensuring consistency amongst educators, aligning with the Berry Street Model. Focus on giving children time and tools to ‘de-escalate’.
- positive feedback as strategy to encourage positive interactions.
- Connecting as a community through group and partner games
- Group reading of children’s books that include diverse characters.
Environment as the Third Teacher:
- displaying risk assessments in areas of discussions
- Buddy’s from Holy Family that act as positive role models
- Provocations that promote partner, small group investigations
- emotions provocation
- providing sensory/fidget tools to de-escalate at moments of dysregulation.
- Organise the indoor and outdoor learning environment in ways that promote small group interactions and play experiences (for example: block building, sensory play, home corner – add natural elements and/or set up home corner outside
Linking this intention to not only our inquiry, but our bookmaking spotlight too. We read some stories including ‘My Country’. This lead to discussions about how to care for our land by picking up rubbish and looking at our veggie gardens. Doing this children had discussions about the different types of things growing in our garden.
Provocation focused on over the past fortnight:
- Practicing mindfulness during rest time
- Exploring our emotions through play
- Sensory provocations to help with self-regulation.
- Group times on what we think is safe and unsafe.
- Community walks
A few specks of golds for us was Halloween last week we loved seeing everyone in their costumes and we even sat down all together and watched a video about the history of Halloween and what this holiday means in other cultures and all around the world! We hope everyone had an Happy Halloween!!
We also celebrated Diwali this week. This was such a beautiful experience and moment for us here at Holy Family to share and embrace this culture with traditions and experiences for us to explore and learn about. A big thank you to Archie and a few other staff here at Holy Family ELC who planned and organised such a beautiful week. We are so thankful.
Both these moments linked to inquiry and created more room for growth and questions for us in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!!
Inquiry Project
Over the past month here in LDC B we started and continued our inquiry we shifted our focus on our communities outside of ELC to start with. Some questions we had during our discussions together were:
- Who is in your family?
- Who is in your teachers’ families?
- What are some of the things you like doing with your family?
- Transport and different adults in our communities and what they do (visual)
- Where do you go with your family?
Big links and forms of knowledge for our inquiry project for the last fortnight were Halloween and Diwali.
This week our focus points for our inquiry were:
This is what we know:
- Who is in some of our families?
- Teachers and peers of Holy Family ELC
- Where we all go (different places in Adelaide)
- What types of transport we use
- What do big people do (different jobs)
What we want to know:
- How do we get to different countries
- What is your culture?
- What type of food do you eat at home?
Children’s voice:
Hugo – I go to the shops with my mum.
Selena – I see my cousins.
Henry – I went to get my haircut with my Pa.
Winnie – I go swimming.
Provocations we did over the past two weeks:
- Community walks to Holy Family
- Group times from staff members about their cultures
- Group times with photos of different times in our community
- Mark making
- Small Group experiences and group times discussing who they have in their families and what they like to do with their families.
- Different transport inquiry in small world play
- Template given to families about their culture and traditions.
Bookmaking spotlight
Our little authors have taken on our spotlight with ease (as we knew they would) Mo Willems is certainly a fan favourite and slowly but surely, we are seeing him shine through our books. We cannot wait to see over the next fortnight our progressions.
Weekly focus
- Start reading author text regularly every day at group times.
- Discuss the author – introducing him (show a picture of him, where he lives, his name)
- Display author and books in our book making environment.
- Book making station always on offer.
- Clear and consistent storage for finished and unfinished books.
- Regular reading and discussions around the authors and the story
- Creating stories in small group experiences.
Mentor texts
- Staying on topic or theme for the entire story / book
- Writing on each page of their books
- Children’s published texts
Reminders
With the warmer weather coming in and transitioning to summer it is super important that all our children have the following when attending ELC each day –
- A sun safe hat
- A drink bottle.
- Sun safe clothes and shoes (no tank tops, caps, thongs, or slides)
Also last week a document about culture and traditions were placed in your children’s bags. This is to help with our inquiry project and have family connections. We would love if you could please fill these in and give them back to us. Attached is an example (Millie’s) for reference and if you would like you can share with your children too.
Trajectories:
- Linking culture and traditions to knowledge of our inquiry
- Connection of Mo Willems to stories
- Start Christmas prep
- Transition prep
Specks of gold:
