Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmehl

Volunteers Thank You Tea

On Friday, we held a morning tea to thank all our wonderful and amazing parent and grandparent helpers and volunteers this year.

“It takes a village to raise a child” – this proverb means that an entire community of people must provide for and interact positively with children, for those children to experience and grow in a safe and healthy environment. I feel this is so true of Kornmehl, and this year we have had so many wonderful opportunities for our Kornmehl community to get involved and offer help. We are always so grateful to families, in today’s busy world, where time is so precious, to be able to have the helpers we need to function so smoothly.

One mum commented that she is so happy that Kornmehl creates many opportunities for parent engagement, at many different levels, and what a special and valued community it was.

From the Educators perspective, we feel so lucky that we have the support from parents, and we love the happy, warm feeling our Kornmehl family creates.

Our Mosaic Pavers – Pattern Making

Children learn best through play, and this works very well when you teach a concept such as patterns. Patterns help children make predictions because they begin to understand what comes next. This leads to mathematical skills, logic structure in algebra, and to establishing order in life. Children will begin to notice things repeat in a certain order by size, shape or colour. Patterns are arrangements of things that repeat in a logical way. These arrangements of colours, shapes, gestures, sounds, images and numbers are a crucial concept for young kids and contributes heavily to their early math understanding. They also help children learn how to make logical connections and use reasoning skills. Patterns can be found everywhere in our daily lives.

Last term, we began a project with the children to explore patterning using coloured gem-stones and loose parts on paper. This beautiful patterning experience has been carried through the term both inside and outside. The intention of this project was to experiment with the materials provided, by understanding how patterning works and its possibilities. These skills and designs will eventually be transferred onto permanent mosaic pavers to go in our newly established native garden. As the children worked with the materials, they were encouraged to make a design from nature. The children first had to draw their design or plan on paper and refer to it to make their pattern. Sometimes the provocations were set up indoors and at other times outdoors. Photos of the works by environmental and land artist, Jon Foreman, were positioned at the table to inspire creativity. The children used both natural and man-made materials to create beautiful eye-catching patterns.

As the children worked there was discussion about the materials they had chosen, noticing, and revealing their unique qualities.

It was evident that each artist had their own ideas of how to organise and arrange their choice of materials, layering was evident with stones being positioned on top of wood pieces and the whole space being covered, whilst others chose to use only part of the space.

This term, the children have continued to explore patterning to create their ideas and designs for our outdoor pavers. We gave the children a starting point, to think of something that is in our garden, that is significant or special. They have been exploring flowers, bees, and trees, with their ideas and designs are coming to fruition. We have started to glue the stones onto the pavers and are getting ready for the grouting process. We are looking forward to seeing the finished art works in our native garden.

Freddy E: I liked it because it had a circle in the middle, and I made circles too.

New Parent Information Night

On Thursday, we joined with all our new families starting in 2023 on Zoom. We spent the evening discussing housekeeping aspects of the Pre-school, with particular attention on preparing and settling the children in, as well as waste free meals, sustainability, and recycling in the Pre-school. Other topics we covered were hours of operation, rest time, safety and security, birthdays, Bush School, the online portal – Educa, communication and illness. We had a good turnout of families, and we hope they found the evening informative and useful.

We look forward to welcoming new families into the Pre-school for their orientation visit on Friday 9 December 2022 at 9.00 am.