4-Year-Old Kindergarten (Field Room)

Welcome Haven families to the end of another busy Term, lets take a closer look at the  focus topics our 4-year-old Kindergarten room explored in Term 3!

Phonemic Awareness: 

Last term (2) we focused deeply on literacy, learning all about letters, jolly phonics and cued articulation. This term (3) we have an extended literacy program which is all about preparing the children further in their reading and writing skills. Although this is absolutely not necessary right now, this allows them to gain insight, to then transfer this into the prep/foundation classroom next year. 

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Which our 4-year-olds are now experts at doing!

As a group we focused week by week on beginning sounds, middle sounds and final sounds of words. Combining this knowledge taught across the weeks the children were able to create words by making first, middle and end sounds (with three letter words). We used actions to support children in understanding this concept, where different actions represented different sounds:

Shoulder = beginning sound

inside of elbow = middle sound

hand = final sound

then running our hand from shoulder to hand = creates the word 

The children were amazed at the idea of being able to read a word from listening to the beginning, middle and end sounds all together. 

Example: word: CUP beginning - C, middle - U, final - P 

action: shoulder - C, elbow - U, hand - P

Numeracy Skills:

Our next focus for the term was numeracy, where we have been focusing on all things numeracy, including the concepts of measurement, counting skills, weight, shapes and number pattern recognition. 

We strengthened our numeracy skills by counting up to 20, whilst also exploring some higher numbers due to the children’s interests. We read the book ‘Ten apples up on top” by Dr Seuss, on our interactive whiteboard. Our interactive whiteboard provides the 4-year-olds with a variety of tools that supports them in their learning, our favourites to do on the interactive whiteboard are: writing/practicing numbers, watching numberblocks, engaging in top teacher digi-games that explore many mathematical topics including measurement, weight, adding, subtracting, bigger or smaller. 

Within our numeracy program we focused on formation, in the air we practiced writing our numbers. To help us learn how to write and further identify them we sang songs that will assist us further, such as 3 = around the tree, around the tree, that’s how you write the number three. 

Focusing on measurement/length, the children were encouraged to find objects in the room to measure. As a group they then worked together to compare the 2 items asking questions are they 'longer', 'shorter', the 'same' and how can we figure out the answer? Deciding as a group to measure with the large wooden blocks, the children (guided by teachers) worked to see how many blocks each object needed and then used their mathematical knowledge to determine what number was higher and therefore taller/longer. We even measured the children, and compared how tall they were!

German Language:

Hallo. That’s right this term the children learnt a new language… GERMAN!

The children have really enjoyed learning a different language and exploring the world in which they live, each week they have shown their excitement and interest in wanting to learn more! Of course, at the start this all sounded hilarious to the children, but after a while it became very catchy and we often heard the children using these words throughout the room.

These words were: Hello -Hallo, Friend -Freund, Goodbye -Auf Wiedersehen, Welcome -Willcommen, and Good afternoon -Guten Tag. 

Each week the children added to their German toolboxes and were always open to new challenges of the topics taught, and loved making these new discoveries. The children always approached this subject with a smile on their faces. It has further assisted them in broadening their understanding of the world in which they live.

Moving on from words we moved onto numbers, the children learnt how to count up to 10 in German. The children had so much fun within this topic whilst also learning so much about the culture.

• Eins
• Zwei
• Drei
• Vier
• Fünf
• Sechs
• Sieben
• Acht
• Neun
• Zehn

We also explored the geography side of Germany, looking at the German flag. The children have absolutely loved learning about the German language, through learning, discussions and questions the children have been able to meet the intended learning around this topic. We are so proud of how far the children have come in learning a new language.

Thank you for a fun filled Term!

Sending warm smiles, from your field room teachers:

Ellie, Dani. B, Isabelle and Jess (+ Caila)