Sun Room

Hello Families,   what a busy term we have had in the Sun Room.   To start with all the children that have moved up from the River room have settled in really well & have already built some strong relationships with  our educators in the room as well as with their peers.

Working from your children's interests, we have been focusing on. At the beginning of the term we started learning about our shapes, we did this through a number of different mediums first we begun with some pasting where the children were given a few simple shapes to paste onto paper, this was to get the children to try and recognise a few shapes such as circle, square, triangle and rectangle.  This was one of our intentional teaching experiences for the term. The children responded well to the experience and then even begun to recognise different shapes around the room and outside in the yard. 

We further extended by adding a shape matching experience, where the children had a work sheet and shapes and had to match the physical shapes with what they saw on the paper. We still used the same shapes as the pasting as not to confuse the children. The learning that was achieved through these experiences relates to outcome 4 in the E.Y.L.F, children are confident and involved learners, the children developed a number of skills including problem solving.  

One of our group time focuses has been teaching the children all about emotions, such as Happy, Sad, Love, Angry. Giving the children a strong sense of emotional and social well being.   The children really enjoyed singing and dancing to “If your happy and you know it”, our feeling stories Such as “when I am feeling happy”, really helped the children gain an understanding of not only their emotions but of their peers to as the children really started responding to each other with a care and empathy. This all relates to learning outcome 1 Children have a strong sense of identity.

With the current situation that has taken over the world, we have really been getting the children to focus on their hand washing. We are doing this more regularly throughout the day.  After outdoor play, educator places soap on children’s hands and get them to rub their hands together by saying “rub, rub, scrub, scrub” at least twice and repeat it while the children have their hands under water washing the soap off.  

Another one of our learning focuses and intentional teaching experiences this term has been working on our letters and numbers. We have been mostly having this

focus during our group times.

For the first few weeks we would only count up to 5, we used two main sources for this, singing songs with physical props so that the

children were able to not just hear the number but see the number, and story time. The songs we have been learning  are “5 little ducks” & “5 cheeky monkeys”. Once the children had a firm grasp on counting to 5 we extended up to 8 with the song “8 jellyfish”.  From here we moved to “10 tricky dinosaurs” 

We have been using the “very hungry caterpillar”also during group times.  The children develop a sense of belonging to their class and peers during mat times. They also become aware of fairness and gain understanding about turn taking as we share our group time props. We have set up a number of visual displays for the children also. One of them that the children have shown quite a bit of interest is our aboriginal display that has a number of bright paintings.   It is important that we are embedding respect to diversity in our  children.  Each day for our group time we do our acknowledgement to country.  This is something that all classrooms are doing, and as your child moves to Forest and Field they will continue to this routine.  

We  celebrated Easter During this term, the children were excited to have their visit from the Easter Bunny. We loved our Easter Egg hunt, followed by our roast lamb lunch.  

The children have really begun using their imaginations in many ways through role playing in our home/camping corner, with our baby dolls, as well as our felt boards  and magnets with children creating their own words and special creations.   The children are continuing to practice their yoga poses. This helps them with their physical well-being which relates to outcome 3.

In term two we will continue our learning from this term, however we will be adding some new and exciting things. Such as our A.B.C’s will be a big focus so that we can start getting the children use to the letters in their names. We will start touching on the weather teaching the children about the sun, rain, hot, cold and once again our hungry caterpillar will help us learn our days of the week.

Stay safe everyone and see you all in term 2. From all of us in Sun Room.