Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmehl

Open Day

The Pre-school held its Open Day on Wednesday morning. We welcomed many parents who were interested to find out what makes Kornmehl special and why they should send their children to our Pre-school. During the morning several people shared with me how impressed they were with the spaces, learning areas – both indoors and outdoors, the length of time the educators have been at the service, the happy engaged children they could see and most of all the warmth they could feel as they entered the doors and how settled all the children were.

We all enjoyed show casing our Pre-school to the prospective families. Thank you to the maintenance team, IT team, Gail Mackenzie, the canteen and all the Kornmehl staff for their efforts and contributions in ensuring the Open Day was a great success.

The Early Years Learning Framework Version 2

The recently released EYLF-2022-V2.0, explores several new concepts for educators and teams to unpack and critically reflect on. One of these concepts is called funds of knowledge. These are explained as the historically accumulated experiences and understandings that an individual has and includes abilities, skills, bodies of knowledge, life experiences and cultural ways of interacting. A child’s funds of knowledge are often described as a “virtual backpack” of all the life experiences, skills, dispositions, and knowledge they bring into the Early Childhood setting.

Educators are responsive to children’s funds of knowledge (experiences and understandings), ideas, sociality, and playfulness, which form an important basis for curriculum decision-making. In response to children’s evolving ideas and interests, educators assess, anticipate, and extend children’s learning, development, and wellbeing via open-ended questioning, providing feedback, challenging their thinking and guiding their learning. Educators plan and implement worthwhile play-based learning experiences using what children already know, their interests, curiosities, and funds of knowledge.

Through these funds of knowledge, children bring their individual, family, and community ways of being, belonging and becoming, to their early childhood settings. Educators who know and can build on children’s funds of knowledge help them to feel secure, confident, and connected to familiar people, places, events, and understandings. This reinforces each child’s sense of belonging.

Children are more likely to be confident and involved learners when their funds of knowledge, and their family and community funds of knowledge (experiences and understandings), are recognised and included in the early childhood curriculum. This assists children to build on what they already know and make connections to make sense of new experiences.

Very young and older children are growing, developing, and learning in individual ways may demonstrate the Learning Outcomes differently. Educators’ knowledge of individual children, their strengths and capabilities will guide professional judgement, to ensure all children are engaging in a range of experiences across all the Learning Outcomes in ways that optimise their learning. Here is a YouTube video, that explains what funds of knowledge are and why educators should care.

Purim

We have immersed ourselves in the many experiences and learning opportunities around the joyous festival of Purim. We are exploring this festival through many different languages:

In Hebrew, we played a Purim Bingo game, which helped the children learn the symbols of Purim, whilst working on visual discrimination at the same time. There were many joyous shouts of “Bingo” as they filled their cards.

All three groups have decorated their recycled plastic bottles, using coloured collage and tissue paper, to make the bottles look colourful. These have been filled with rice, to ensure that when they are shaken, Haman’s name can be blocked by the noise that our Rashanim make. Activities such as these teach the children to be focused and to develop resilience to complete tasks through from beginning to end. By using bottles that were recycled, we have created awareness around the action of re-purposing objects that might previously be considered rubbish.

The Starfish engaged in a collaborative, inclusive block construction design, where they created the palace in Shushan – a ‘Purim Party Palace’ using blocks, cylinders, cars, wooden trees, and people. This allowed for some creative, vertical building with many layers. Foundations were made and construction grew. Some children shared their thinking and ideas – a car park was made. a park was created adjacent to the palace and in case there was a fire in the palace a fire station was built. There were also bedrooms and toilets.

The children also engaged in making puppets of the Purim characters, using them to imaginatively act out the Purim story. We spent time making masks. During these experiences, we observed the children’s fine motor skills, such as their pencil grip and eye-hand coordination. These are great opportunities for the educators to identify strengths and areas to develop.

We are looking forward to celebrating Purim on Monday with Kornmehl children and families from 9.30 am – 10.30 am.