Preschool and Childrens Centre

We welcome Thushan Liyanage a final year Master of Teaching in Early Childhood Education student from Flinders University who is completing his practicum in our Preschool for the next 8 weeks. He has spent the past couple of weeks building relationships with the children, the staff, learning the daily routines and will begin leading some of the group learning sessions from next week.

The children have been involved in some learning investigations in our garden. Some of the children have noticed sap on our trees- it has been fascinating hearing the children’s theories about what they think it might be and how it came to be there. Another discovery outside was ladybugs in our garden and this has led to daily counting and tallying of how many found each day in the garden and an opportunity to explore the life cycle of lady bugs. Perhaps you could start a conversation with your child about these preschool discoveries? (sap and ladybugs.) Maybe you could even investigate them in your own garden or while out and about with the family? We would love to hear about your discoveries.

Another interest of the children has been music. The children have demonstrated their dancing and movement skills as they have spun and twirled, jumped, and bounced to the music. They have tuned into the beat of the music and demonstrated their ability to match their dancing to the music- moving fast & slow and the introduction of scarves has added another way for the children to confidently explore movement and dance too. We will continue to explore music and movement in play. If your child has a favourite song, we would love you to share it with us so we can add it to our playlist.

We have finished up our work on the Bear Hunt story and will begin exploring our next focus story “Handa’s Surprise.” In our small groups we will continue our focus on the Phonological Awareness skill of blending and segmenting syllables. Our speech pathologist Hannah has provided us with a parent handout explaining these important foundational skills with ideas on how you can support and extend the learning at home.

Each week small literacy focus groups support children to learn new vocabulary. Our focus is also on sounds in words through blending and segmenting. The children  are enjoying breaking the words into syllables. Maybe you could try this at home. Perhaps you could ask your child to segment their name? eg. Carlo =Car-lo, Vinti= Vin-ti