Early Learning Centre
Welcome to the Early Learning Center!
We have begun the year with orientation sessions for our 44 students in 3-Year-Old and 4-Year-Old Kindergarten with one member of their family staying for the first week and slowly increasing to no family members for half sessions and then the children braving the kindergarten classroom by themselves.
We are excited to welcome for 2023 Mrs Cairns as the 3-Year-Old teacher and Mrs Kidney as a co-educator. Together they have welcomed 22 new students, their families and provided our students with a warm welcome as they established new memories for the children away from their parents, some leaving the safety of their grownups and home for the first time.
The 4-Year-Old Kindergarten class has Miss Mitchell as the teacher and Mrs Cairns as the co-educator. Mrs Svigos will be working all 5 weekdays to cover Mrs Cairns’ administration time and lunch breaks for staff.
We are so excited to share these milestone years with you.
Kindly,
Fiona Mitchell, ELC Director
4-Year-Old Kindergarten
We dived straight into learning from Genesis 1 on how God created the world in 7 days. This was our first bible story explored to understand how the children came to be. To understand who they are as individuals we explored who they are in Christ. The children created light and dark collages as they explored day one of creation.
Group times have been instrumental in the children learning who their classmates are and knowing who they can play with in a day. Singing songs to identify names, following actions games such as “simon says” and listening to the children introduce themselves to each other have been pivotal ways of establishing new friendships, re visiting interactions that are encouraged under the umbrella of “the Bayside Way” and building trust and respect for one another.
Activities offered in the past fortnight have been open ended dramatic play such as our car wash, outdoor safari and Chinese restaurant. Fine motor activities included adding stickers to large printouts of the children’s names or learning how to hold scissors and then to cut along lines. Puzzles, a tent for playing, resting and storybooks were introduced as well as a loose part construction area where the children are encouraged to use their imagination and combine man made, natural and recycled materials alongside a train track.
Social interactions were supported with the addition to our sandpit of buckets and spades, sand claws and tonka trucks as the children navigated sharing, as well as asking peers to help them navigate our new seesaw.
Next fortnight we are excited to dive deeper into learning about each other, playing games to identify students, learn about days 2 and 3 of the story of creation and visiting the college library on the south campus.
We look forward to sharing our educational moments with you this year in this space.
3-Year-Old Kindergarten
It was wonderful to welcome the children and families into the ELC for their first orientation sessions last week. We began to become familiar with the routines of the day, such as group times, inside play, outside play and mealtimes. We met 'Gail the snail' our ELC puppet for supporting emotional wellbeing.
We noticed that Gail the snail was feeling nervous, and talked about how it was normal to feel nervous when we begin new things. We read "The Kissing Hand" (Audrey Penn) and learned a strategy for feeling connections to home whilst we are in the ELC. Many children made their own kissing hands with their families. We read “Whoever you are’ (Mem Fox) and are beginning to learn about the ways we are all similar.
This week was the children's first visit without a grown-up staying and they all did a tremendous job of settling and engaging in the activities and routines of the day. The children have begun to form some new friendships with their peers as they begin to engage in collaborative play. We are looking forward to next week when the children will begin their first full days.
Alyssa Cairns, ELC Teacher
