Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmel

Kornmehl Arava connections

This week the Starfish and Dolphins have been working on making a drawing to share with the children from Gan Rimon in Ein Yahav, in the Arava. The children all drew themselves and shared their name and age with their new friends. We are very excited to begin this association and to get to know each other better.

Pesach explorations

We began our learning around the festival of Passover and all the wonderful traditions, stories, characters, songs, food and creative experiences. We tell the story of Pesach using animation, song, music, props and costumes and invite the children to take on roles in the story. Re-enacting the story in this way helps to bring it to life and allows the children time to process the details and make sense of it.

The children have started learning a variety of wonderful songs – When Moses was, One morning when Pharaoh awoke in his bed, Bang bang bang, Dayeinu, Listen, King Pharaoh, How did Moses cross the Red Sea? Ma Nishtana? and Who knows one?, to name but a few.

We have been making our own visual representations of wild animals and frogs, Seder plates using different mediums and making baby Moses in the basket.

All the children will be participating in a Pesach Seder in the Pre-school on Thursday 25 March 2021.

Protective behaviours

Deborah Blackman’s workshop on Tuesday night with Kornmehl parents on Zoom was informative and gave parents tangible and hands on skills and strategies for keeping children safe and opening up communication with your child about protective behaviours. Deborah also spoke to the children on Wednesday and Thursday morning reinforcing these same messages.

Some of the key messages were:

Good and bad feelings and recognising these
Good secrets and bad secrets
Private parts are private
Safe and not safe touches
Always tell an adult
Safety network – tell your child who their safe adults are (4-5 people)
Encourage open communication about any topics
Tell your child who it is okay to be left alone with or to go in the car with, without your permission (e.g. grandma). For anybody else, your child needs your permission.
Have regular conversations about the “safety rules”
Validate your child’s feelings
Always give your child the message that you believe in them.

The educators have been following through this week in all three groups with discussion and role plays to support the children’s understanding of these concepts and to allow them to share their thoughts and ask questions. Our aim is to make sure that we, as a community, are all using the same language and giving the same messages to our children.

Vacation care

Emanuel Vacation Care Program will take place in the April school holidays from Tuesday 6 April 2021 to Friday 16 April 2021. There is a fun and interactive program organised to cater for children from Pre-school to Year 6.

Let your children be bored – how to handle a bored child

Parents often feel guilty if children complain of boredom. it is actually more constructive to see boredom as an opportunity rather than a deficit. Children need the adults around them to understand that creating their own pastimes requires space, time and the possibility of making a mess (within limits and to be cleared up afterwards by the children themselves).

They will need some materials too, but these need not be sophisticated – simple things are often more versatile. We’ve all heard of the toddler ignoring the expensive present and playing with the box it came in instead.

To get the most benefit from times of potential boredom, indeed from life in general, children also need inner resources as well as material ones. Qualities such as curiosity, perseverance, playfulness, interest and confidence allow them to explore, create and develop powers of inventiveness, observation and concentration. These also help them to learn not to be deterred if something doesn’t work the first time and try again. By encouraging the development of such capacities, parents offer children lifelong values.

If a child has run out of ideas, giving them some kind of challenge can prompt them to continue to amuse themselves imaginatively. This could range from asking them to find out what kind of food their toy dinosaurs enjoy in the garden to going off and looking for bugs. Of course, it’s not really the boredom itself that’s important, it’s what we do with it. When you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself. But unless we are faced with a steady diet of stultifying boredom, we never learn how.

It’s especially important that kids get bored and be allowed to stay bored when they’re young. That it not be considered “a problem” to be avoided or eradicated, but instead something kids grapple with on their own.

Most parents would agree that they want to raise self-reliant individuals who can take initiatives and think for themselves. But filling a child’s time for them teaches nothing but dependence on external stimulus, whether material possessions or entertainment. Providing nurturing conditions and trusting children’s natural inclination to engage their minds is far more likely to produce independent, competent children, full of ideas.

Children need time to themselves to switch off from the bombardment of the outside world, to daydream, pursue their own thoughts and occupations, and discover personal interests and gifts.

Just letting the mind wander from time to time is important for everybody’s mental wellbeing and functioning.

A study has even shown that, if we can engage in some low-key, undemanding activity the wandering mind is more likely to come up with imaginative ideas and solutions to problems.

A creative imagination and problem-solving ability are important life skills, so it’s good for children to have these moments of ‘boredom’ and having to find ways to entertain themselves.

It will also encourage the ability to be quiet and mindful as an adult, without the constant need to be on-the-go or entertained. In fact, there’s a lesson here for all of us. Switching off, doing nothing and letting the mind wander can be great for adults too – we should all try to do more of it.

“Boredom teaches us that life isn’t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency.” Pamela Paul

“Children need to sit in their own boredom for the world to become quiet enough that they can hear themselves.” Dr Vanessa Lapointe

Below are some links to videos and information about boredom in young children: