It has been a busy past month at in the Koala group with Parkdale Library Visiting, an excursion to Parkdale primary, weekly playball sessions, photographs with Cheryl, dentist check ups, St John Vianney’s and our weekly Bush Kinder session. The weeks are flying by!
Two of our group goals this term are to support the children to interact verbally to express their feelings and ideas with others, and to continue to encourage children to develop their social skills such as respecting one another, sharing and turn taking. To support these goals we explored through discussion and emotion cards what feelings were and what makes us feel certain emotions at kinder and other environments. We are also encouraging children to notice that we can also express ourselves through our body language for example our facial expressions and that often we can tell how a person is feeling not just from what they say but what how they look. We used emotion cards to support this as the children were able to recognise from visuals what that emotion card was. We chose three emotions to discuss with the children Angry, Happy and Sad. The discussion was guided by questions such as “what things make you feel happy, sad and angry?” and “what are some things that we can do if we are feeling angry or sad”. Within the kinder environment we are encouraging children and questioning them when they make choices “how would that make the other person feel” and working toward recognising these emotions and fostering choices that create positive feelings amongst the children in the group.
Over reconciliation week we shared with the children Aunt Annies story “Sorry Sorry” . This is a story about Indigenous people and how they felt when white settlers came to Australia. It touches on how they felt during this period of time and how long after the white people said sorry and how we to this day continue to say sorry and remember what happened in Australia’s past. We discussed with the children during the story how we think the people would have felt and how the story made us feel. This followed on from our emotion exploration and encouraged the children to think deeply. The children also explored how Indigenous peoples lived and their ways of living. From this each child created a mosaic hand representing the colours of the Indigenous flag. The children were also asked the question “What does sorry mean to you” and their words are displayed with their hands on the wall.
Over the last few weeks I have engaged in some short personal development sessions, these have been online based and provided me with more insight and learning into supporting children with challenging behaviour, constructing creative spaces and supporting self regulation. Each time that I engage in these I take away different learning and approaches to my own teaching. One of the most common questions as an EC is WHY and moving forward I am constantly reflecting on Why I am doing what I am doing and how this is supporting the children’s learning best.
Kind Regards Ellie
