Kornmehl
Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmehl
Beautiful Stuff project
This Term, we will be celebrating National Recycling week from Monday 9 November 2020 to Sunday 15 November 2020, a time to bring a national focus to the environmental benefits of recycling. The theme this year is ‘Recovery – A future beyond the bin’. The children from all three groups will be engaging in a project called Beautiful Stuff.
In the holidays families and children were invited to look at home for interesting objects that were no longer needed and could be recycled for our project. This could include objects from nature or be man-made. Brown paper bags were sent home to fill with each child’s collections. The idea was to look for potentially useful materials and find interesting stuff to bring to Pre-school to share with their group and enrich our classrooms. The aim is to explore the materials in each room. The children will be involved in sorting, counting, grouping, touching, making and discovering together.
So, at the start of the term, little brown paper bags were brought back to Pre-school filled with lots of exciting treasures!
The bags were placed on a table in the room, waiting to be opened at morning meeting with the whole group. The idea was to create a sense of excitement and anticipation to see what was inside the bags.
Following on from this, is the opportunity for each child to share at morning meeting what they have found. The objects are then sorted into categories using recycled containers in the classroom. Once all the contents of the bags have been viewed and sorted across all three groups, the children will then engage in making art installations using all the recycled bits and pieces.
We are excited to get busy MAKING…SORTING…CLASSIFYING…and using our IMAGINATIONS to create wonderful installations and works of art.
Adamama Community Urban Farm
Adamama is a Jewish community farm connected to Shalom College, that runs working bees, where families can help out on a Sunday morning with weeding, mulching, digging, planting, sowing and watering the vegetables. They also run a number of other initiatives such as: the compost collective, pickling project, bee project, birthday parties, school excursions and team building sessions.
On Friday, the children from all three groups enjoyed an excursion to Adamama Urban Farm in Paddington. Each group visited the farm for one and a half hours.
During this time, they got to learn about the farm – its purpose and what grows on the farm. The children got to play in the mud kitchen and mud patch, and each child planted some seeds in a small pot. The children all had morning tea or lunch at the farm. It was a lovely way to connect our young children to a community farm. Mitch Burnie, an Emanuel School alumnus, is the Farm’s Manager and was recently interviewed as part of Emanuel School’s Speaker Series.
Parent engagement
On Wednesday night, parents were invited to attend a webinar on School Readiness: A parent’s guide to pre-reading, writing and numeracy skills. This was run by Merryn Develyn from Teaching Tools for Tots. The webinar covered:
- Play-based learning – why is it so important and what is it teaching?
- The Vestibular system
- Speech and language development
- Modelling reading books, vocabulary and comprehension
- Teaching emotions/feelings through picture books
- Pre-reading and numeracy skills – what are they and why are they so important?
- Fine motor development and writing
- Developing numeracy concepts incidentally
- Hands on, practical, simple games and strategies to develop numeracy and mathematical skills and vocabulary.
We hope that parents found the workshop informative and learnt some lovely practical strategies to do at home to encourage pre-literacy and numeracy skills.
Parents have also been invited to video themselves reading their child’s favourite story book. Parents can be creative during this time, dressing up or using props to share the story. This week we began sharing the stories as a surprise to the children at story time. The delight on the child’s face when they realised their mum or dad was reading the story was just priceless. We look forward to receiving lots more stories over the coming weeks.
