Eucalyptus Group Term 3, 2022

Eucalyptus

The children have been engaging in more cooperative play and working together in more activities. This could be at the blocks – making a large building or pirate ship, role play in the café area, a board game or helping each other in the box construction / craft area. With this play comes more negotiation, listening, taking on other ideas and being flexible, trying new things and helping others.

Buddy time on a Wednesday continues to work well and with some support and guidance from teachers to negotiate what or where buddies might play. This activity promotes peer scaffolding, new friendships, language, being flexible and working together.

We have some incursions coming up this term, Dream puppets and African drumming. Dream puppets are really wonderful and often inspires the children to make their own puppets.

We have a lot of sensory play and fine motor play in the room as always. We recently had frozen ice with treasure inside it as the children have had lots of pirate play and building. They have loved melting the ice using the pippett droppers. The squeezing and releasing of the droppers is a great activity for fine motor strength.

With school transitions coming up soon it is important to get to those if you can and children are welcome to come and go if it is during the session. If you have times or dates for transitions, please let us know and we will do our best to plan around and have children ready to go.

Some things to practice for school are – getting dressed and undressed, putting on shoes, packing their bag, opening containers in lunch box, managing the toilet independently and asking for help (this is one of the most important skills of all).

We are always chatting about kindness and how we use our hands and bodies at kinder however will have some extra focus on this with some stories and more discussions as the children’s play has become more cooperative and collaborative, we have also found we are increasingly needing to talk about body boundaries and being kind.

Thanks, Kirsty and Rex