This week was a bit cold and wet so children had to spend more time indoors. But a bit of water won’t stop us from learning and having fun. While the preschoolers went deeper in their knowledge about dinosaurs, math concepts and music, toddlers and babies focused on the environment and started learning about this season that’s almost over, Autumn. We are also glad to say: Laura is back! The children welcomed her back with hugs and smiles. They had the opportunity to reengage in the physical and well being experiences in Spanish.

Next week our educators are going to be working in how to use our spaces and resources in a flexible and inclusive way which maximises each child’s learning and participation. It’s important spaces and resources are inviting, connect children with the natural environment, and allow children to work with other children or take time out to rest or explore on their own if they wish. Do you have any suggestions or comments? We’d love to hear them

Preschoolers

Friday 22^nd May: Paleontologist for a day!

Today we became real archaeologist for a day. First, we learnt about the different duties and responsibilities in an archaeological excavation (paleontologist, geologist, photographer, museum specialist…) and when we had an idea of the different tasks, we choose what we wanted to be and got nice identification cards to wear during the experience. Then, we got ready to go outside and discover that our sandpit had became a proper archaeological site with a grid made with thread. Each one of us took a shovel and a brush and chose a section to dig. We had so much fun finding dinosaurs – we even found an ancient rhino buried there! -, taking pictures and cleaning our discoveries. At the end we set them up in a beautiful exposition for everyone to see them like in a real museum.

Monday 25^th May: Shapes and dinosaurs!

Today in the preschool Room, Miss Jenny showed us that she had her flu shot over the weekend, which sparked a discussion about injections and how to remove band aids, showing that we have an increasing capacity to understand, self-regulate and manage our emotions in ways that reflect the feelings and needs of others.

As part of our dinosaur project, the preschool children were engaged in a discussion about shapes, quantity and numbers when we used our felt board and looked at some felt dinosaurs, each with a number on them. The discussion was based around how many felt shapes could fit on each dinosaur, and corresponded to the number the children could see, and they were able to engage in and contribute to this mathematical discussion.

Our playdough was a bit sticky today, and we noticed that it was easily getting stuck to some of the preschooler’s hands! We talked about how we needed to remove some of the dough from our fingers before we went to wash our hands, otherwise the drains might get blocked with the playdough, which might affect the fish in the ocean.

Tuesday 26^th May: Outdoor Day 

On Tuesday,  a fire truck pulled up outside our classroom so we had a great discussion about firefighters, firetrucks and the importance of their job. The preschoolers showed their keenness to hypothesize in their expressions of interest in what was happening outside.  

Yesterday was raining so today everyone was very excited to have a chance to play outside, and they were fascinated by the changes in the playground after all the rain – the ground was wet, there were leaves around, and slugs! Juliet wanted to show everyone the slug, and some children were excited to see it, others thought it was gross! Some used the magnifying glasses to inspect a slug, many others, played in the wet sandpit showing curiosity and enthusiasm for what was happening following their own interests and exploring ideas. As they were pretending the sandpit to be a beach, our educator went to get our box of stones and shells and tipped them into the sandpit. All of us and they were all sniveled up very quickly. Our outdoor day finished with a reparation project, fixing the cubby house that had a broken planter box outside. We all enjoyed taking part in the process of deconstructing a structure and manipulating the tools required.

Wednesday 27^th May: Dinosaur dice race game

As a few of our preschoolers have new baby brothers and sisters, today we decided to read The new baby at your house (by Joanna Cole). The children were interested in the words womb and uterus, so after the story, Miss Jenny drew an outline of a pregnant lady, with the womb with a baby inside it, and we talked about how the baby grows inside the mother’s womb, getting bigger and bigger, until it is ready to be born. The discussion included what babies do, what they eat, and how we can care for them. We spoke with one another about how sometimes babies do funny and nice things, and sometimes, because they are learning, they might try to get involved in something we are doing, which we may not be ready for. This guided the conversation towards talking about children’s emotions and their responses to others, supporting their development and understanding of self-control and emotional regulation.

We worked on puzzles and the creation of a wooden blocks dinosaurs museum together celebrating their team achievements.

We played a dinosaur dice race game this afternoon. For this game we used a chart with the picture of different dinosaurs down the bottom and a dice where each side had the picture of one of those giant lizards. Children had the opportunity to engage in the game rolling a dinosaur dice and then placing a counter in the blank square above the dinosaur that they had rolled, and when they reached the top of the chart on one dinosaur, they were able to stop and count how many counters each dinosaur had collected. This game encouraged children to work on their own sheet, but alongside others, and it involved the intentional teaching of language such as most, least / fewest, same.

 Thursday 28^th May: Preparing special gifts 

Today we welcomed a new friend today, her name is Sansa, and she was very happy to be at Amigoss! She was a bit tentative at the beginning of the day, but she soon warmed up to draw some pictures with Hannah, and also play with the Jenga blocks.

We also continued with our dinosaur dice race game and played a card game to reinforce the concepts of more/most, less/least.

Few weeks ago, on book Day, one of our friends brought in an amazing book with different 5min stories in Spanish that we love. Our educators are using them to teach us some more Spanish since most of the stories we’ve already heard them in our heritage languages so we are able to recognize them easily.

During the afternoon, we used face painting to turn into butterflies, werewolves, mice, dinosaurs or even the entire space. With a bit of paint anyone can be anything!

Toddlers

Friday 22 nd May: the face of our emotions

Children understand complex concepts in differnt ways. One of those is by visual aids like pictures, experimentation or videos. To give our little ones the opportunity to learn more about the emotions we watch a short video of the movie “Inside out”. This is an interesting animated comedy. Its complex story shows that it’s important for you to experience a full range of emotions, even negative emotions like sadness or anger. We stopped the video everytime an emotion appeared to explain a bit more the feeling and talked about things that make us feel that way. 

Monday 18 ^th and Tuesday 26 th may:What’s autumn?

The temperature is going down and children as asking why the leaves are oranges and no green? We went to explore the outdoor area, collecting different natural resources such as wooden sticks, leaves and more. Once we all collected the leaves and autumn stuff, we made an area with just autumn resources to make it clear for all the children. We also watched a video with a brief explanation of autumn to make it even clear. This experience helps children to understand about the world, what happen in every season and they are able to explore and discover new colors and textures.

Wednesday 27^th May: Autumn Playdough!

Playdough is the best open-ended resources where children can use their ideas and creativity to create what they want, mixing it with texture, smells and colors. This time we wanted to make a different playdough in regards to our topic. Children helped us to squeeze an orange to make a smelly playdough, then we also added cinnamon to make with a nice essence. Then everybody worked on make the playdough adding flour, oil, food coloring and more. When we finished children spent lot of time playing and smelling the “Autumn playdough”, working on social skills sharing the tools and waiting for turn every time we added an ingredient.

Thursday 28^th May: Making our autumn tree!

As at the beginning of this season we started an Autumn tree in our room, we still need to finish some parts of it. We sat all around in a circle and I showed to children a video related to Autumn. Then we all got ready to start painting the leaves according the colors of autumn leaves. Every child painted 5 leaves with different colors and we put it to dry. Second stage of this experience is cut the leaves and place them on our tree! Working on Spanish vocabulary and learning about the autumns it’s been very funny!

babies

This week was very cold and with a lot of rain, but this was not an impediment for our babies to continue learning and enjoying their time at Amigoss. This week I noticed some interest from babies in cars and every time they took a car they made their sounds. So we were in the playground to play with the tricycles, cars, and trucks.
This week our sports and yoga class returned, and our older babies participated in the classes. Very motivated the babies with the help of the educators managed to have their classes and it was wonderful to see how our little ones participate with joy and enthusiasm.
Also, one of our babies started walking and she is happy because she can explore objects in many ways (shaking, banging, throwing, dropping) in this way she is developing her balance, stability and coordination.