4- Year -Old 

Kindergarten

How is it already the middle of the year. They say time flies when you're having fun ;) Let's have a look at our 2 main focuses for term 2! 

Emotional regulation:

We can all agree that this is an important topic to explore with children, as it has many benefits. To start the program off we introduced the children to our classroom pet; Winifred (Winnie for short)

Winnie introduced the children to emotional regulation in allowing them to gain an understanding that all feelings and emotions are okay, however there are certain strategies we can put in place, to keep not only our selves safe, but our peers as well. Winnie lived in our calm down box to further support the children. Following on from Winnie, the children explored zones of regulation. This program looks at the complexity of emotions and feelings in a visual way for children to gain a deeper understanding and gain the skill of being able to transfer this knowledge into other settings. 

The Zones of Regulation program is a fantastic resource for teaching children how to master the following skills:

·         Sensory regulation: The ability to learn how to manage and respond appropriately to sensory input from their environment.

·         Emotional Regulation: The ability to recognise body cues associated with different emotional levels and understand how others think and feel in response to our emotional state.

·         Executive functioning: The ability to have cognitive control over our behaviour. Our executive function skills include our ability to sustain attention, plan, problem solving and use positive self-talk.  These skills are vital for building a positive foundation for the development of resilience skills.

Zones is broken into 4 colours. 

Blue - Sad, bored, sick, moving slowly & tired

Green - Ready to learn, calm, happy & focused

Yellow - Excited, silly, loss of some control, frustrated & worried 

Red - Angry, yelling, hitting, loss of control 

The kindergarten children have a sound understanding that we always want to be in the green zone however we may go through all the zones within our day and that is okay as we have support and strategies in place to further assist us. We also tied in a few different programs to further assist the children's knowledge and to fill their toolboxes around self-regulation, such as: How fast is your engine, Tucker Turtle & Bucket filling. 

Our next main focus for the term was literacy. 

The children were introduced to Jolly Phonics and Cued Articulation to further support them. 

 Both programs bring different benefits to the children surrounding the concepts of sounds and phonics of the alphabet, so it only made sense to merge these together. 

Jolly Phonics uses the synthetic phonics method of teaching the letter sounds in a way that is fun for the children. Together we have been singing songs for each letter of the alphabet. 

Cued articulation is a set of hand cues that teaches the individual sounds of a word. The hand movements are logical and each movement represents one sound and the cue gives clues to how and where the sound is produced. 

Whilst exploring each letter of the alphabet it brought up some great spontaneous learning moments, such as when we were learning about the letter c and its sound. When Charlie said her name started with the letter c, the children turned to her and said no, it doesnt have the 'C' sound. This making for a great learning moment and meaning the children were able to extend on their literacy skills even more. The children understood that if a word beginning with the letter C had a H next to it than its sound would be CH. I was blown away just how much the children understood this concept. We came across many more learning moments throughout these programs, which enabled the children to gain a deeper understanding around the complexity of the English language. We couldn't be prouder of the kindergarten children :) 

Annalise, Ellie and Caila are looking forward to another fun filled term next week :)