Preschool Learning Reflection. Week 8, Term 3, 2023.

Niina Marni preschool children and families and welcome to week 8 learning reflection.

Inquiry:

As part of the catholic ethos we support children to develop a love, respect, and appreciation for all of God’s creations. Our inquiry project provided opportunities to explore natural environment, growing plants and learn about the importance of plants, trees as the sources of fresh food. They have shown an interest in caring for the natural environment.

Children were so excited to prepare the sign for our Pre-school garden bed. They explored other vegetable gardens to gather ideas. with the help of the teachers, they observed and named different vegetables and herbs in different garden.

Our experiences included:

Exploring different plants and herbs (based on Angela’s ideas) to grow in our vegetable garden.
Visit community gardens for ideas.
Watering the bean plants.
Observing leaf growth.
Starting to work on our garden.

Mr. Gerry McCarthy supported preschool children to plant lettuce, tomatoes, carrots as well as the beans from our bean bag project. He also showed them how to water the plants and children harvested carrots for our kitchen.

Learning Intention: To support each child to deepen their understanding of different shapes by using a range of familiar materials around the environment.

Why:

Supporting children to identify different shapes and organize visual information.
Sort, describe and name familiar shapes in the environment.
Learning shapes provides children with spatial awareness and visual discrimination as they identify different shapes.
Understand learning area vocabulary.
They develop conceptual understandings, procedural fluency, and adaptive reasoning skills to facilitate transfer of their mathematical knowledge to contexts outside the mathematics classroom and this is supported when the mathematical ideas with which they interact are relevant and meaningful.

Children identified different shapes and connected the shapes to different objects in the environment. They observed the pictures in the book read to them, thought about other familiar shapes in the room and outside at the yard. happily shared their ideas with others.

They enjoyed identifying different shapes, tracing them with natural items.

Children used different connectors and shapes in their building experiences.

Literacy Intentions (our hopes for their learning)

To support children developing the ability to hear the sounds within spoken language.
Reading picture books regularly. Children will enjoy a joyful connection to picture books.
Continue using mark-making tools, such as crayons, textas, pencils, paint, chalk, sand (as they create texts during this process).
Children will build symbolic functioning, sharing something about the marks they have created.

Outdoor play became more fun for current warm weather. We are fortunate to have a huge outdoor space for various types of experiences. Children enjoy walking on the rocks by the Billabong as much as playing at the playground.