Through our Welcome Inquiry, we begin each week outside doing our acknowledgement of country. We feel the earth, discuss what we hear and smell, and share what we are grateful for in the natural world.
Marcus – “The sun that keeps us warm.”
Conrad – “Water that comes from the clouds. We need it for drinking.”
Leon – “We need eucalyptus for bush medicine.”
Ruby N – “Trees that bring us food from the ground.”
Ruby P – “The night time so we can sleep.”
Leon – “The Aboriginal people were really, really important to Australia. And also, they’re very special to us because of the European People and what they did was not very nice.”
Henrietta – “We need to say thank you to the whole country because that’s where everything comes from.”
We have shared dreaming stories: yarning circles and using symbols for yarning: learned Woiwurrung words and the Woiwurrung Hokey Pokey, and explored Indigenous culture through bush tucker and bush medicine. We are connected to country, and our Indigenous Communities. We have enjoyed sparking the students’ curiosity and seeing where their questions can guide us next!
Our exploration into our big idea of “What Is Community?” continued with our first visit from the local Fire Brigade last Friday. Firefighters Richard, Ross and Michael shared their equipment with the children and discussed how we can be safe around fire. What do we do if there is a fire in our house – stop, drop and crawl to a safe space if possible; how to call the fire brigade and other emergency services “000”. They also explained all of our community helpers such as police, doctors, nurses, teachers, crossing guards, SES workers, postal workers, and paramedics. All of these people help keep our community safe and the students enjoyed sharing what they knew about these important workers.
The firefighters were very impressed with the questions that they were asked after their presentation:
“How do you know what type of fire you need to put out?” Angus
“What do you do to put out a chemical fire?” Gabe
“How do we know if you come to our house that we can trust you?” Tigerlily
We are all very excited for the second visit tomorrow where the children get to look at the firetruck, hose, and maybe even hear the siren!
Meanwhile, the children continue to be exposed to regular practice in fine motor skills and in letter and number formation to ensure the development of good handwriting habits. Developing their fine motor skills is key to children becoming fluent, legible and competent writers. There are a number of factors that we discuss with the children when working with them to develop their handwriting skills: comfort and flexibility of the writing hand, pencil grip, posture and paper positioning. The children are developing their understanding that these things will all affect the way the letters and numbers are formed, which will really help them when documenting thinking in their books.
Embedded within our inquiry provocations, we have created authentic number and writing opportunities for the children to practise their skills. These include adding words to picture story books the children have written; writing high frequency words that we know (and make reference to each day); using big books to cover and hide these HFW’s for the children to guess what word ‘might make sense’; and using manipulatives to form numbers in a variety of ways across the 3 learning spaces.
