Hello families, during these special times, at Amigoss we continue to provide experiences that allow everyone keep up with learning. As the attendance has decreased, we’ve been engaging in lots of mix age group activities where the little ones learn from the older chil’s examples while the last ones, increase their responsability and empathy. 

Have a look at the different adventures your children had lived this week. There had been a great variety of activities like, group art project, cooking experiences, learning how to put on clothes, creative writing initiation or painting with foam.

Preschoolers

Friday 27^th March 2020: Group art project

On Friday as we weren’t many children, we all participated in the same experiences. Older and younger children made an artistic creation of an autumn tree on the playground floor. In this group art project, we all worked together giving us a sense of belonging in a group responsible to create something special. Some of them worked together placing toilet paper rolls to represent the trunk of the tree. Others, were collecting every orange, red or yellow object they could find for the leaves of the tree.  Working in group art projects provides the perfect atmosphere to learn about supporting and encouraging each other and gives enhanced social skills and interactions. This project gave us the opportunity to focus on cooperation and communication rather than competition. Group experiences help us to gain better understanding of ourselves and of others.

Then we played a fun game that made our muscles and brains work together. We made 2 groups who stood in line on one side of the playground. On the other side, on a table, there were 2 empty apples trees and a dice. One person of each group would run to the table and roll the dice. After identifying which number, it gave us we made the correct number of little playdough apples and we put them in our group tree. It was really funny to see our educators trying to help us cheat by picking us up and running with us. This fun experience allows us to practice our numeracy skills while doing some exercise improving our gross motor skills.

 Monday 30rd March:  Apple salad

Today we have been talking about apples with children and where they come from, looking at some pictures of apple trees and passing around some real apples, some full and some cut. Children were able to touch, look and smell the apples.

After, we made an Apple Salad, we cut the apples and placed them in a frying pan to cook gently. We added cinnamon, sultanas and some water and we made a fantastic apple compote that we had for afternoon tea.

 Tuesday 31^th March: Pine cones

Our educators showed us different pine cones and asked us what we knew about them. We all said different things but what none of us knew it was that pines are one of the oldest plant species alive today, and that they hold the seeds for the pine trees. We were really lucky to be able to observe some of those little seeds that can grow to become gigantic trees. Then we used some of those pine cones to create artworks.

Wednesday 1^st March: Autumn clothes challenge game!

Today we had lots of fun playing the “Autumn clothes challenge game”. First, we sorted out which pieces of clothing belong to the autumn season and after we played a collaborative game of dressing up. In pairs, we had to dress our partner with three items of clothing in 3 min. This game encouraged team work, listening skills and communication skills.

Thursday 2^nd March: Creative writing!

Today we took out from the cupboard our almost forgotten story stones. We added some related to the season and we practice our creative writing with them. We made a really imaginative story that says:

Once upon a time, there was a rainbow and a butterfly came out to talk. And the rainbow was talking too! (Abby) They went inside the door of a castle and then a scarecrow came and the crow came but he wasn’t scared of the scarecrow and he ate the scarecrow. Then crow’s house got burnt and spider came into the house and made a spiderweb. (Lachlan) Spider ate pumpkin and the man cried because of the spider. (Cynthia) Then the leave fell down and the man got scared of the spider because the spider fell down too. (Martina)

Story stones are great teaching tools for developing children’s communication skills, promoting their language skills and encouraging their imagination and creativity. They allow non-verbal or pre-writing pupils to create stories and narratives by combining and placing the places.

Toddlers and babies

Monday  30th March: Autumn has arrived

Introducing children to autumn, we used a video as support to talk about what happens with the trees in this season. Showing what happened with the temperature and how we should dress up according the weather. Starting with creating our own tree, children got familiar with autumn colors, choosing yellow, brown, red and orange to paint this tree. This experience was made with preschoolers where toddlers could learn some skills from the old ones using role modeling. What a nice teamwork!

Tuesday  30st March: How does an Autumn leaf look like?

Going in deep with the leaves, children went outside collect all the leaves they found. After sitting together, we used clay to stamp and observe all the details of autumn leaves. This experience helped children to explore and discover new textures, making wet clay and messy play! This also make children to think how clay can get hard if we put it in the sun, improving problem solving skills.

Wednesday 1^st March: Painting with foam

Let’s keep sensorial experiences, what better with shaving foam. Children helped me to put the shaving foam on the table, where everybody could observe how it start to get bigger and bigger. Children chose the colors of autumn, mixing them with a stick to create new colors. When everything was mixed, they placed a paper on the top to get a stamp and create autumn leaves, working on cognitive skills.

Thursday 2^nd March: what to wear in autumn

As we all can realize how the temperature is going down, we wanted to use pretending play to make clear for children how is the proper way to dress up and not get sick. With a doll, children had the turn to put a piece of clothes on it, working on self-skills. For some of them were quite difficult and other easier.  Working in a group to achieve same goal make them develop their social skills.