Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmehl

School Readiness

Early Childhood Services are well placed to contribute to the foundations for children’s long and short-term success at school. The first five years of a child’s life are critical to a child’s lifelong development. By supporting all areas of children’s development and focusing on building strong, responsive relationships with young children, we provide children with the skills and confidence to continue along a path of life-long learning.

Early experiences influence brain development, establishing the neural connections that provide the foundation for language, reasoning, problem solving, social skills, behaviour, and emotional health. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we prepare and develop our children’s potential and ability to learn in these early years.

Young children’s social and emotional development is the foundation for their cognitive development. Supporting children’s school readiness is about assisting them to develop their skills in areas such as literacy, numeracy, and self-care when they are ready for this, and at their own pace. Children’s social competence is at the core of their readiness for school and effective school transitions. Social skills such as sharing, turn taking and playing well with other children are essential in assisting children’s short and long-term success at school. Responsive, positive relationships between children and their educators are also crucial in building children’s self-esteem and resilience, which further assists them to make effective transitions from early childhood settings to school environments.

Emotional maturity implies that a child has reasonable control over their emotions. This influences important aspects such as self-confidence and self-esteem. It develops over time. The link between social and emotional skills and school success is a strong factor that needs to be considered when deciding if a child is school ready or not. Having good social skills and being a confident learner sets the foundations for a lifetime of learning.

School readiness is integrated into our program from the time a child starts at Pre-school. We aim to prepare children for school by promoting all areas of their growth and development. A program that closely observes and responds to children’s needs and interests will provide opportunities for encouraging the skills and attributes needed for starting school. We also focus on pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills, which are taught in a fun, hands-on way and embedded into our play on a daily basis.

We focus on using children’s current skills and interests as the basis for promoting their development, rather than requiring them to complete structured, more formal academic tasks. We know that young children learn these skills best through play.

Our focus is on preparing the children for their transition to Year K. Next week, we will discuss the many ways that we do this.

Burger Centre Visit

This week both the Starfish and Dolphins visited the Burger centre in Randwick. It’s always such a treat to visit this wonderful facility and to be able to see first-hand the benefits of inter-generational connections. On Tuesday, The Starfish were invited to be part of an incursion with the Taronga mobile zoo. The ranger, Ryan from Taronga Zoo, was knowledgeable and sensitive by being able to cater to both his audiences – young and old and presented an interactive and informative hands-on workshop, that delighted us all and kept everyone mesmerised for over an hour.

Ryan brought five special Australian native animals to visit us. We learnt lots of interesting information about these beautiful creatures:

The Blue Tongue Lizard – a fruit and salad eater who loves to eat snails, slugs, and worms too.
The Shingle Back Lizard – who shows his teeth and muscles to scare his predators and his tails grows back if it comes off.
The Bearded Dragon – who’s mouth is yellow inside to scare off predators and her skin feels like sandpaper.
The Carpet Python – named “Darling” from the Murray Darling River who lays 20 eggs and shivers her body to cause friction to keep her eggs warms.
The Ornate Box Tortoise from the USA called “Zippy” who was found in someone’s suitcase and rescued by Taronga Zoo.

The highlight of the animals was “Leroy” the Echidna, who delighted us as she walked closely amongst us, and we got to experience her prickles and unique cuteness up close.

Thank you to The Burger Centre for inviting us to join you all for this wonderful incursion and see first-hand the vision of this incredible intergenerational exchange that took place through spending time together and all experiencing such joy, wonder and delight, whilst learning about these beautiful native creatures.

We all felt very privileged to have this incredible experience.

National Bandanna Day

On Friday, we raised money for Canteen to support children and teenagers suffering from cancer. We all purchased colourful bandannas and wore them to Shabbat. We are proud to be able to support others in our community and to instil compassion and caring in the children from this very young age.

We also enjoyed a special visit from Jim and Jeany Kornmehl, who joined us for Shabbat.

Happy Birthday

We wish a very happy birthday to Aimee Schnapp (5). We also wish Justine Robertson and Terry Aizen a very happy birthday. We hope you all had a beautiful and special birthday.