We have been focused on getting to know each other and supporting the children to settle into school, feel valued, and see themselves as an important part of the prep neighbourhood. To this end, we have been running a series of workshops and provocations to build the children’s capacity to engage with others and collaborate.
To make connections to our lives outside of school, our individual histories and to build a collective understanding of who we are as a community, the children have been exploring “All about me” as a part of our Welcome Inquiry. The children have been enthusiastically sharing information about themselves and their families to each other, and we have incorporated these sharing times into our morning routines to help us get to know each other better.
We delved deeper into our interests and asked “What am I curious about?”
Sachi – “I like Dinosaurs and I want to know about machines.”
Henrietta – “I like books with pictures that are funny but I also like thinking on my own.”
Conrad – “I like Dinosaurs and the ocean.”
Theo – “I’m interested in Big 4 Wheel Drive Trucks.”
Throughout these many early experiences we have been discussing “What is a community?”
Ruby N: “It’s people sticking together.”
Poppy: “It means looking out for each other.”
Tigerlily: “My buddy always looked out for me.”
Ruby P: “Showing kindness to others can help the community.”
Daniel: “Sharing things in the classroom.”
Harriet: “Community means lots of different things. It’s sharing, being kind, helping out, recycling and looking after the outside and not polluting the environment.”
Wren: “Sometimes it can be showing other people the special things that are super important to you.”
We can belong to many communities, including our Princes Hill School community.
Linked with getting to know each other, the children have been exploring maths concepts linked with measurement. We have been looking at sequencing familiar events in order and, most recently, finding ways of measuring ourselves using informal units. This has been a very collaborative experience with groups of students coming together to help each other count and work out totals using Unifix blocks. We have also explored the idea of estimation, suing this to help us make predictions about ‘how many’ or ‘how long’ before we gather out materials.