Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmel

Pesach

We are continuing to learn about Pesach, through a number of different ways. One way is through discussion and storytelling where we are sharing knowledge and understanding and gaining further insight into what the festival of Pesach means, its customs, rituals, symbols, and the foods we eat.

This past week the children have been immersed in drawing wild animals and frogs using a variety of mediums. We have also looked closely at all the foods on the Seder plate and learnt about their meaning.

We have participated in lots of cooking experiences, from matzah pizzas, to charoset, to dipping parsley in saltwater and learning about the tears of the Jewish slaves in Egypt, to making our own matzah.

The children have loved these interactive experiences and enjoyed all the tasting too. Through all these sensory and visual experiences, the festival of Passover comes alive for the children and has meaning for them.

Through group discussions, role play, dramatisation, song, clay, painting and drawing, the children are given the opportunity to make their thinking visible. When they dramatise and act out the story, the children gain a better understanding of what it means to be free and what it would have been like to be a slave.

We talked about the fact that we are free people and able to make our own choices. For example, we are free to choose who to play with and where to play. We talked about Who’s the boss of your thinking?

The Dolphins have been exploring the concepts of freedom and slavery through the hundred languages.

The children were invited to use the language of drawing to make their thinking visible. This is how they described their drawings: 

Finn – Moses is leading me and holding my hand. My engine is red, I’m angry.
Elisa – It’s when Moses freed us, and we were happy.
Luke – I felt happy when I was free, so I could play Lego. I felt sad as a slave. My engine is blue.
Mili – I felt blue and it’s the Red Sea. That’s when we got free and walked away from King Pharaoh.
Alice – Everyone was happy when we were going back to our house. Some people were smiling because we were making a plan to sneak out the door.
Arlo – This is Moses and his stick and everyone going through the Red Sea. The slaves feel red and blue, it’s hard to explain…Red because they were angry, blue because they were sad. I drew hammers with nails and bits of wood that the sad slaves used.
Ollie – I drew when I’m happy and King Pharaoh is not around. I’m shouting at King Pharaoh. I am angry to be a slave.
Jaimee – Happy because they are not slaves and are free.
Leah – I am happy because I am free from Pharaoh. I am sad because they are making me a slave.
Penny – When I wasn’t a slave, I was happy and I did what I wanted to do. When I was a slave, I was sad and didn’t know what to do.
Georgia – Free and happy after being able to cross the Red Sea. The slaves couldn’t cross the Red Sea without Moses.

On Thursday, we all participated in our own interactive Kornmehl Pesach Seder. The children all arrived at Pre-school dressed in their best Shul clothes and were eager to participate in this long awaited Chag. The tables looked beautiful and the food was delicious. Each child participated in dressing up and dramatising the story. We had three King Pharaohs, three Moses characters, Yochevet, baby Moses in the basket and lots of slaves. What a triumph it was when Moses led us to the Red Sea, and it parted, and we were all led safely to freedom and the land of milk and honey. We sang, rejoiced and ate delicious matzah ball soup, lots of Matzah and all the traditional foods found on the Seder plate too. We all had a wonderful time. Our Seder ended with the children all going on a hunt to find the Afikomen.

Thank you to all our wonderful parent helpers: Bolien Brown, Edith Lawrence, Sharon Arnott, Sally Greenberg, Oliver Berger, David Weiner, Sharon Joseph and Katherine Spiro. Your help is very much appreciated by all the teachers and the children.

Open night

The Pre-school looked fabulous last week Wednesday night for our Open night. We had two sessions for families to attend. We had about 35 families attend and they were all delighted to see the Pre-school and look at the spaces and learning areas. Many thanks to  Gail Mackenzie for all her hard work in co-ordinating this event. It is always a pleasure working together.

Thank you to the amazing Kornmehl team for always going above and beyond and for the incredible job they do each and every day. The learning was very visible for families to see, as well as being able to feel our warm, caring and nurturing environment.

End of Term drinks for all staff

It was wonderful to host the whole school end of term food and drinks in the Pre-school on Tuesday afternoon. We know that many Emanuel School staff have never been down to the Pre-school before and it was lovely to be able to share our spaces and learning with the Emanuel community. We hope you all had a lovely afternoon.

Centennial Park visits

Next term we are excited to commence our visits to Bush School at Centennial Park in Week 3 for the Dolphins and Starfish groups. 

The Bush School approach does not stand-alone from early childhood education and care. The Belonging, Being and Becoming: Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) recognises the importance of the outdoor environment in the development of young children. 

The Early Years Bush Connections concept is informed by other successful outdoor learning practices from well-researched and established international examples such as Forest Schools, Wilderness Awareness schools, Wild Play schemes and Nature Kindergartens. 

We believe Bush School has many advantages for the children, especially in today’s hurried society, where the children do not get enough uninterrupted time to just play and be in nature for extended periods of time.

Some advantages of Bush School are:

• Open-ended resources in visually simple spaces – giving children the opportunity to be creative, to observe, to be inspired and to problem solve in an open-ended natural environment.
• Risk full learning – the development of a risk adverse society is creating what Tim Gill calls the “shrinking horizons of childhood” where the independence and freedom of childhood has been curtailed.
• Eco-friendly and sustainable living – do we want the earth to still be beautiful in 60 years’ time for our children? We need to encourage an ecological awareness in the children from a young age. Real materials are far more sustainable and encourage the children to use their imagination more than materials that are prescribed.
• Physicality – children need to be more active. Movement is critical to each child’s health and wellbeing. The physical aspects of their development are promoted through running, climbing trees, and physically being in wide open spaces with a canopy of trees for a roof.
• Children who play regularly in natural environments show more advanced motor fitness, including co-ordination, stamina, balance and agility, and they are sick less often.
• When children play in natural environments, their play is more diverse with imaginative and creative play that fosters language and collaborative skills.
• Exposure to natural environments improves cognitive development by improving their awareness, reasoning and observational skills.
• Spending time in nature has shown to reduce stress. Nature buffers the impact of life’s stresses on children and helps them deal with adversity. The greater amount of nature exposure, the greater the benefits.
• An affinity to and love of nature, along with positive environmental ethic, grow out of regular contact with and play in the natural world during early childhood.
• Early experiences with the natural world have been positively linked with the development of imagination and the sense of wonder. Wonder is an important motivator for lifelong learning.
• Motivation, concentration and problem-solving skills are developed through exploratory play.
• Children who play in nature have more positive feelings about each other. The development of self-confidence and self-belief comes from children having freedom, time and space to learn, grow and demonstrate their independence.
• Natural environments stimulate social interaction between children. It fosters an increased awareness of others and our actions on them as well as encourages sharing and co-operative play.
• Language and communication development is fostered by being in the outdoors. This is prompted by visual and other sensory experiences of participating in a bush school program.

Happy Birthday

We wish a very Happy Birthday to Arlo Berger (5), Adam Gavshon (5) and Xander Kogan (4). We also wish our special Educator Joanne Woods a very Happy Birthday.

We wish you all a Chag Pesach Sameach and a happy and restful holiday. We look forward to seeing you all back at Pre-school on Monday 19 April 2021.