Glen Education Orrong Road

Time spent in the Community

Liang Li, Early Childhood Teacher

At Glen Orrong Rd, we are a big advocate of supporting children’s learning of early literacy and numeracy in meaningful ways. Knowing how to write or memorize numbers or letters is not the ultimate goal we want to set for children but to engage them in a manner that is relevant and applicable to real-life experiences. 

Since ‘Norman the Slug with the Silly Shell’ has been one of the most popular books at kinder, we decided to conduct an excursion – going to COLES to buy all the necessary ingredients to decorate our own donuts. 

Since it’s an excursion for grocery shopping, making a shopping list will be the first task. Children were invited to use either writing or drawing to help the educator create the shopping list. While drawing the items one by one, children were also encouraged to write relevant letters for these items with the assistance of the alphabet chart. In this way, children are able to convey and construct messages with purpose and confidence, building on home/family and community literacies, as well as begin to understand key literacy concepts, such as letter-sound relationships, concepts of print and the ways that texts are structured (Linked to EYLF Outcome 5).

Once we came back from the excursion, we held a group time to talk about how much money we spent on all the items, count how many donuts we got altogether, and to learn how to read numbers related to money properly. After counting 48 donuts (It was a very long counting process!), children were invited to guess the amount of the money we spent on the grocery to get some basic ideas of money. It was so interesting to find out children’s concepts towards money, for we received many fascinating answers, for example, 1 million, 500,000, 100, 1, 5 etc. And the final answer was $41.7. We learnt the symbol that represents money, as well as the way to read dollars and cents. Through this experience, children have gained an increasing understanding of number using vocabulary to describe names of numbers, and they have learned how to use language to communicate thinking about quantities to describe attributes of objects and collections, and to explain mathematical ideas (Linked to EYLF Outcome 5). 

Apart from all the learning, the most important part of this experience is, certainly, the process of decorating our own donuts and enjoying them for afternoon tea!