Witam (Hello) Preschool families, welcome to our week 7 reflection.
Learning Intention:
To support children’s engagement, development and self-regulation through strengthening their sensory processing capabilities.
Continuing on from our previous learning intention around positive education, we have placed our focus on sensory processing in the aim to support children to self-regulate and ground themselves. 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.
CLAY
Encounters with clay continue to showcase each childs’ curiosity, wonder and creativity. We began this project with a clump of clay in its most pure form and over the last few weeks have followed our learners interest and curiosities by adding more tools and resources. This week modelling tools captured the interest of many children as they were able to create shapes and shavings of clay to manipulate into different creations.
LIGHT
Light offers an intriguing element to our spaces and experiences. In addition to the warmth and calming effect it has, it draws children to investigate, test out hypothese and create their own learning pathways. The addition of transparent blocks this week provoked ‘rainbow’ making and colour mixing.
NATURE
Nature provides a learning environment full of sensory enriching opportunities for children. With the addition of the mud kitchen this week, the sandpit has been a particular point of interest for children to work collabrotely in they cooking endeavours.
CUBBY HOUSES
There is yet to be a day where cubby house making has not been requested. Acknowledging the needs expressed by chidlren, we ensure that there is an abundance of fabric and resources for them to create their calming spaces each day.
Learning Intention 1:
To encourage children’s expression of ideas and identity through collaborative visual art/making experiences and mark making.
Although oil pastels have been offered previously this year, the addition of black paper proved to offer a more vibrant and engaging mark-making opportunity. There has been an incredible amount of involvement in this experience this week, which has made us wonder… what other marking tools could we offer moving forward?
What is particularly inspiring to observe in mark-making experiences is the unique marks children make and the pride they take as they express themselves creatively
MAKING (box construction)
We saw some very innovative creations in the atelier this week in our making sessions. As making has become a ritual in preschool, children are beginning to plan more deeply for their projects, setting purpose in their designs.
Bookmaking
Author Study: Aaron Blabey
Following the evident love of ‘Pig the Pug’ by Aaron Blabey, we have begun an inquiry into the characters of Pig and Trevor. As we read new books from the series this week (Pig the Rebel & Pig the Monster) it was very evident that Pig and Trevor are portrayed by the author with the same traits in each book. With this knowledge, we created character profiles.
Story Table: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
The familiarity of this text provoked lots of participation by our learners this week. There was very evident prior knowledge held by many children, who chose to read along and explain the story line of the Very Hungry Caterpillar using the manipulative on offer.
Inquiry Project
Many preschoolers accepted the play invitations on offer in our environments, partipcating in drawing animals, small-world play and making habitats.
We continued the research phase on inquiry by watching documententries and reading information texts about elephants.
Some prior knowledge:
Mark: they have trunks
Jack: they can walk with their legs
Junior: they drink water and spit it out
Thomas: they have big ears
Alice: big nose
Some new discoveries:
-elephants babies are called calves (thank you Ryansh for sharing)
-they use their trunks to eat and drink
-their big ears cool them down
-African Elephants are the biggest animals in the world
Some new wonderings:
-Why isn’t there elephants at the Adelaide Zoo?
Numeracy Through Play
‘How many ways can you sort these items?’
Road Construction
Trajectories:
-what animals could survive in the billabongs?
-what other avenues could we use to research
-continue with visual art experiences
-Harmony week collaborative painting
-Aaron Blabey author study: Thelma the Unicorn character profile. What are we noticing about his characters?