Volume 30 Issue 26 27 Aug 2021 19 Elul 5781

Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmel

A positive atmosphere and the wellbeing of children within an educational setting is promoted through attentive care and quality interactions with children. We spend much of our day at Pre-school supporting the children’s emotional and social development, which enhances the children’s relationships through thoughtful and sophisticated approaches. We use conversation, discussion, model behaviour and language for children to express and communicate.

Children who experience relationships that are built on respect, fairness, co-operation, inclusion and empathy are given the opportunity to develop these qualities themselves. When children have positive experiences or interactions, they develop an understanding of themselves as significant and respected, and this supports feelings of belonging to a group.

Social skills are vital in enabling an individual to have and maintain positive interactions with others. Many of these skills are crucial in making and sustaining friendships. Social interactions do not always run smoothly and an individual needs to be able to implement appropriate strategies, such as conflict resolution when difficulties in interactions arise.

It is also important for children to have ’empathy’ (i.e. being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and recognise their feelings) as it allows someone to respond in an understanding and caring way to how others are feeling.

Our days at Kornmehl are focused on these core principals and, throughout the day, many opportunities arise to role model, discuss, share, and encourage these important life skills that will support the children’s wellbeing and resilience for many years to come.

Grandparents Day

Each group have been discussing that we cannot visit the elderly people in the Burger Centre and Montefiore Home because of COVID. We also shared how sad we are that all our Kornmehl grandparents cannot come in to visit at the moment and especially for our annual Grandparent Days, which were meant to be this term.

Together, we discussed ways to share what we do at Kornmehl with these special people in our community. We decided one of the ways was to each draw a special picture on a card and to write a special message to our grandparents. We also decided that we can still share our Shabbat with them, by videoing a Shabbat celebration on a Friday and sending the video link to our Grandparents.

So, two weeks ago, we all performed during Shabbat for the special video.

During the week we shared this video link with our elderly community and hope that it brought some joy and happiness into their day when they watched the video and received the special cards.

A big thank you to Mr Ben Marshall from the IT Department, who came to video for us on the day. We appreciate your help immensely.

Rosh HaShanah

Oliver: “You need to blow the shofar, so it wakes up everyone”

We have immersed ourselves in the beautiful festival of Rosh HaShanah. We were delighted this week to have Mr Adam Carpenter from the Primary School Jewish Life department join us on Zoom to blow the Shofar for us. The children have learnt the sounds that the Shofar makes and that we blow the Shofar to wake up our minds and bodies and to think and reflect on our actions and behaviours during the month of Elul.

To provoke the children’s thinking, the Dolphins did a role play about two friends not letting another friend join in and ignoring him. 

What do we learn from this story and how can we get better?

Finn: Be kind.
Joshua: Be nice and don’t ignore your friends.
Ollie: I want to get better at building.
Finn: You just need to practise.
Alice: I want to get better at knots. 
Evan: I want to get better at puzzles, keep trying and doing a bigger number puzzle.
Daniel: I want to get better at blocks, I need to go to Block School.
Adam: I want to get better at building Lego techniques.
Bronte: Doing ballet. 

The children were shown a Shofar and asked what is this used for? 

Juliette: A Shofar.
Matteo: A Shofar is for Rosh HaShanah.
Jack: My brother has a Shofar, but it is a different colour.
Educator: What is Rosh HaShanah?
Juliette: We eat apples and honey on Rosh HaShanah.
Sam: The bees make honey.
Adrienne: We eat sweet things.

Comments about bees and honey:

Where does the honey come from?

Mili: The flowers.
Adam: Cause of the nectar.
Evan: Bees and hives.
Finn: The bees come from the hive and look for flowers to get nectar and make honey. They have evil ones that sting you.
Alice: And they only sting people they’re frightened of.
Adam: The ones at Kornmehl don’t sting.

We have focused particularly on drawing and learning about bees and where honey comes from. We realise that young children learn best through interactive and hands-on experiences, where they can use all their senses and a variety of mediums. With this in mind, we expose the children to learning in many ways. Several experiences were provided enabling the children to use different languages to represent their knowledge and understanding about bees. A sorting, counting and finemotor experience was set up in the shape of a beehive. The children used tweezers to place balls of nectar in the hive.

At another table an assortment of materials was provided to make bee puppets using cellophane, sticks, paper, pipe cleaners etc. We also provided a variety of loose parts in yellow and black for them to create their own bee installations.

Making clay honey pots out of clay for Rosh HaShanah….

Looking at pictures and real honey clay pots, the children were invited to make their own honey pot using clay. This was an exciting, yet challenging project for the children to embark on.

Clay is an incredibly rich medium that promotes creativity. It also helps promote self-confidence, encourages self-expression, and develops problem-solving skills. The children had to think and explore ways to make the base and sides of the honey pot, as well as ways to join two pieces of clay together, using water and slurry. They used natural objects to add patterns and texture to decorate the clay pots.

We encouraged the children to share their ideas and knowledge, acknowledging the children’s strengths. We also shared some techniques for working with clay.

We noticed the calm effect that clay can have on children, and we offered a big chunk of time for them to work on their clay pot, making it an unhurried activity.

We look forward to giving families something special for their Rosh Hashanah tables.

Book Week

We are celebrating Book Week in the Pre-school. We invited each child to bring in their favourite book from home to share with their group. The children have been reading and enjoying many different books across the week. The Seashells engaged in a beautiful creative art experience using coloured dots and circles of all sizes after being inspired by two books called – The Dot by Patricia Intriago and Press Here by Herve Tullet.

Guess what’s living in our garden?

An awesome WOW moment for all of us, was when a beautiful Blue Tongued lizard, that we have seen wondering around the compost bins, came walking down the pathway across the playground on Thursday afternoon. What a great spontaneous learning opportunity. The children were very excited.

Gratitude

This week, we would like to express our gratitude and thanks to all our Kornmehl families, for organising a delicious morning tea for us on Thursday morning. We were blown away and thank all the families immensely for their love, support, and kindness. It meant a lot to us all.

The card read:

Please all enjoy this beautiful morning tea/brunch in gratitude for the remarkable work you are all doing at this crazy time.

Happy Birthday

We wish a very happy birthday to Marlene Einfeld our special Seashell educator for Sunday. We hope you have a lovely day.