Welcome back to our weekly blog. In here, you can see the highlights of our educative program and understand a bit better the adventures your children engage at Amigoss. There is going to be information about the activities, some photos and reflections about the development of your child.

Feel welcome to have a look and add your ideas, thoughts or comments. We hope you enjoy our first post and thank you for being part of the Amigoss Family.

Preschoolers

Feelings and Emotions

This year we are exploring our feelings and ways to take control over them. We are exploring what means to have feelings via movement, drama, drawing, talking and participating in literacy activities that help them build vocabulary and word recognition skills around topics that relate directly their daily lives and experiences. Children are also learning the words in Spanish by repetition and dramatic play. These weeks we are encouraging the children to take responsibility in their own wellbeing by identifying their emotions and giving them tools to control them. Taking any opportunity to talk about their feelings embeds the topic in our daily routine.

Friday 21^st of February

During these days we’ve been learning on how to recognize facial expressions showing the feeling of different people. To do so, we’ve been observing different emojis and getting use to them. On Friday, we used some big printed cartoon faces to play celebrity heads with them. One volunteer sat on the couch with a headband where the teacher had put a face on. The others had to give some clues so that person could guess which emotion he/she had on the head. This fun experience provided us with the opportunity to improve our communication skills having us thinking in how to explain the feeling without using its name. A good trick for us to use was to finish a sentence that said “I feel like this when…”. This game promoted emotion recognition, communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Monday 24^th of February

We started the week with a hungry mind waiting to learn new things. To fill up our minds we started with a Pictionary game where we review feelings and emotions and their names in Spanish and English. After that, we played in small groups with our emotions dice. We had to take turns to roll the dice, and make a mark on the emotions recording sheet indicating which face came up.

Dice games are fun and encourage us to improve our social skills, patience and good sportsmanship. With dice we explore the wonders of probability, put math calculation skills to use, improve visual perception and manual dexterity,

Tuesday 25^th of February

When we got to school our teacher told us great news: Pancake day was ON! During our group time, we turn on our special ‘TV’ -blackboard- and every channel was talking about this special day. We learnt that for some people this day is not only about the delicious treat. The importance of it remains on being the preparation for Easter. We talked about the tradition of fasting for Lent and that got us wondering what is something we would want to give up and how that would made us feel. Cultural appreciation and awareness contribute to building a positive self-image. Developing a strong foundation of belonging and acceptance through cultural celebration and education helps us to create a diverse social network and understand much better the diversity of the world we live in.

Wednesday 26^th of February

When we got to school, we discovered some Story Stones had appeared in the class. They looked like the stones from the front garden of the centre but these ones had peculiar drawings on them. We sat down and tried to identify the pictures. While some of them had faces with different expressions of the feelings we’ve been talking about, others had some items we find in the street and roads. Alltogether they made no sense so we decided to give them meaning by creating a story with them. Each of us choose a stone and had to add a part in our creative classroom tale. We ended up with a nice story that sounds like this:

“Once upon a time, there was a house in a garden and a rainbow came out. Suddenly a panda appeared, all angry and wet because a rain cloud was on his head. Then a star appeared and took the rain cloud of the panda, but the rain came all the way onto the star, and it made it not work. All the light of the star went out because of the rain, and it didn’t shine any more. The star walked over the zebra crossing to go to the doctor. It found a sign that said STOP, and it stopped. The caterpillar is worming there, and go to the tree and goes to its house and turns into honey and then turn the butterfly open, and wakes up into a butterfly. The butterfly is hugging the star. A truck appeared and helped the star by taking it to the doctor. While they were travelling a thunderbolt killed the panda. Instead of getting it to the doctor, the sun came out and shined its bright to the star and made it blink. That same light of the sun shone into the panda’s eye and put love in it making it go back to life. A happy person came and cuddled the panda. A spider came along and gave another cuddle to the panda. And everyone is allowed to cross.”

Later on, we created our personal story using 5 stones and lots of imagination, creativity and problem-solving skills.

Thursday 27^th of February

Today was our big adventure to the park! Over the past few days, we have been talking about road safety and how to stay safe on the street (“If you are silly, a truck will come past and go through the red light and squash you onto the road”, “You should cross at the zebra crossing”, “The lights go green if you’re allowed to go, but that means the cars stop”). We gathered together before we left to don our safety vests (“We look like building workers!”), and to hear about the activities we would be engaging in once at our destination (“I already know that park, I go there with my brother”).

On the way there, we enjoyed looking at all the signs on the street as we held onto our red rope. We said hello to a lot of people passing, and a fire truck driver waved to us and even put on his siren as he drove past, and a bus driver chatted to us through his window, and then honked his horn as he drove away! We saw lots of cars, trucks and bicycles, but we made sure to stay on the foot path.

When we arrived at the park, we sat down to share some morning tea together. After we had finished eating, we all stood in a circle and practiced our two-handed throwing and catching skills as we took turns with a ball game.

On our way to play on the park equipment, some of us noticed that there was rubbish lying around, and we became rubbish warriors, collecting the pieces and putting them in a nearby bin.

We immensely enjoyed exploring and extending our physical capabilities when we were allowed some unstructured play time in and around the park equipment. We discovered that we could use the shouting cones, which distorted our voices as they carried our words across the park, we used the musical stomping bells with great fervour, and we built up our leg muscles as we climbed the rope pyramid and slid down the slide.

To finish off our marvellous morning, we went on a nature hunt, where we had to collect some pandanus leaves, a spiky ball, a piece of bark and a leaf. As part of caring for the environment, we were only allowed to pull off the brown pandanus leaves, not the green, and to collect leaves that had already fallen to the ground.

Returning was just as fun, as we waved to people in the street, chatted among ourselves, and sang camp songs as loudly as we could! Our teachers pretended that we were going back to other places instead of AMIGOSS, when we stopped in front of the doctors, the art gallery, and a house next door! It was very funny, and some of us protested loudly that we “weren’t at school yet!”.

Toddlers

The World of colors

As the project we have for this month is COLORS. We will plan for children: Each color is taught over the course of one week. Every day there is a simple activity to teach that color to the toddler. We will be working to cover all the developmental areas through the week. The color of this week will be AMARILLO/YELLOW.

Monday 24^th February: What color is the sun?

One of the favorite experiences for toddlers is gluing with ripped paper. Toddlers like to rip things. They are very curious about glue. Add in the fine motor activity of gluing pieces of paper onto a sun printable and we have a great learning activity that fits the attention span of a toddler. Children enjoyed the part of ripping the paper, they also learn a new word in Spanish “SOL” (sun) This experience helped them to work on small finger´s muscles and practice on eye-hand coordination.

Tuesday 25^th February 2020: Apple sorting!

To cover the cognitive developmental are we played a game related to classifying the colors. In a basket with lot of apples, children had to pick just the yellow apple and set them on the tree. Most of the children were able to recognize the yellow and the red. Some of the benefits to learn the colors are the vocabulary that they integrate to their language. Colors sometimes give us information about health and safety. For example, we use red in our culture to indicate ‘danger’ or ‘stop,’ such as with red stop lights and red stop signs. Colors can also tell us about our health. If a person’s skin has blue marks, it may mean they have suffered a bruise. If a person’s skin turns red, they may have spent too much time in the sun. And black marks on the wall could indicate the presence of an insect, a spider, or even mold

Wednesday 26^th February 2020: Washing yellow toys!

Covering the outcome 2 Become socially responsible and show respect for the environment we did an experience where children collected all the yellow toys in a big box. The weather was perfectly hot to mix the learning with water play. Then with brushes and sponges each child grabbed a toy from the box following by washing them and cleaning them. This type of experiences makes them have knowledge of respect for natural and constructed environments. They demonstrated a good understanding of taking care of toys, showing respect to their environment.

Thursday 27^th February 2020: Pompons Sorting

Encouraging children to learn yellow and exercise those little finger muscles and hand-eye coordination. This task will help them to practice grabbing the tongs and self-serve their food, encouraging them to be independence and self-autonomy.

Babies

Animals and their sounds