Kindergarten
Term 2
Welcome to a weird and wonderful Term 2! Thank you all for the enthusiasm, engagement, and patience you have shown as we have begun our journey with online learning. We appreciate the kind and encouraging attitude, and honest feedback that you have shared with us so far.
Having such a supportive and open community of families has been key to us getting our online program up and running! We’ve loved hearing feedback such as how the online program has helped you better understand play-based learning. We’ve also appreciated collaborating with you on how the program will best work for your family. Using our online platforms, we hope that we can maintain a sense of community for all the children and build their understandings of connectedness to others regardless of location.
We hope that you are enjoying the learning activities in our online program. We will continue to provide a varied range of experiences that reflect a holistic curriculum. What we are sharing is designed to be modified – we are conscious of sustaining our individualised approach to learning, where every child’s individual learning trajectory is respected and planned for. This is why the back-and-forth nature of sharing via Storypark, and regularly ‘touching base’ with you will continue to be important going forward.
Continuing to communicate allows us to provide individualised learning extensions for your child and allows us to focus on the process of learning. If your child has a strong interest in something at home, please share it with us! Similarly, if they are showing a strong disinterest in certain types of activities it is important for us to know!
We are mindful that this is a complicated and potentially stressful time for families. We recognise that it is not easy to juggle work and family commitments at home. We want to reassure you that there is absolutely no expectation for you to ‘do it all’ when it comes to the online learning program. Whilst we have designed a suggested schedule, it is up to you how much or little you choose to implement with your child. If you are starting to feel overly pressured or that you are having to ‘cram in’ too many activities, take some time to reassess and perhaps dial it back. Our aim is not for families to feel they need to perfectly replicate a Kindergarten day in the home. We hope to provide opportunities for children’s learning and development in their current contexts. Learning in context is particularly important for children in the early years as it supports them to make more meaningful learning connections and understand how skills and knowledge are applied in their world.
This is a great opportunity for children to be looking at themselves and their home environments through new learning lenses. We hope that your children start sharing new observations about things at home that they may not have made connections to before!
Importantly, be sure there is time in the day for your child to have unstructured play. We’d love to hear about their imaginative pretend play and self-driven projects. Play is a child’s most effective way of exploring, reviewing, and consolidating learning. We will be sharing some tips for how to extend your child’s learning and support them to incorporate key concepts as they play, so keep an eye out for those!
We feel so fortunate to be working with your families during these uncertain times, hopefully together we can continue to build a unique and inspiring program of learning for your children!
Poppy and the Kindergarten Team
Lara Ronalds, Poppy Woodhouse
& Courtney Booth
Kindergarten Teachers
lara.ronalds@preshil.vic.edu.au