Visiting Isleworth Kindergarten

Some weeks (usually on a Wednesday) we walk across the road to visit Isleworth Kidsfirst Kindergarten. This fits in with our Learning Through play program and allows us to develop closer connections with the people in our community. 

As well as playing with the kindergarten students Team Awa has a chance to read a story to them. This gives them a rare opportunity as the youngest pupils in a school to be the older more experienced one and share some of their new learning with these younger children.

Learning through play - Float or sink

This week we used our prediction skills to guess whether objects would float or sink when we placed them in water. Then we did an experiment and actually put these things into water to see if our hypothesis was right. 

Learning through play - learning to be a scientist

During Learning Through Play time this week we tried a scientific experiment.

We learnt that to act like a scientist we needed to observe, ask questions, make a hypothesis (what we think will happen), do an experiment and report our results.

This week we looked at some baking soda and smelt the coloured vinegar. As we observed we noticed that the baking soda was white and dry and the vinegar looked like juice but smelt really bad. 

We asked what will happen if we put some vinegar on the baking soda and we hypothesized that it might change colour, get wet or explode. 

Next we each had a go at trying the experiment before we reported our results by drawing what happened. 

You can see some of the photos of our experiments and read some of Team Awa's quotes.

"Its exploding!"

"It sounds like fizzy drink"

"It look like coca-cola"

"Eww! It's stinky"

"It's changing colour"

"Eww! It smells even stinkier now"

"The blue and the red made purple fizz"

"It made fizzing"

"Wow!"

"It's mixing, it's making Aqua."

"They are making fizz, yukky fizz"

"Mine is making dark brown"

"It stinks"

Learning Through Play - Week One

In Team Awa we have Learning Through Play time most afternoons after afternoon play. 

Learning through play is particularly powerful as the children will not only learn our focus skill or knowledge for the week but are continually developing their creative thinking, oral language, social skills and fine and gross motor skills as well as being exposed to authentic literacy and numeracy contexts as they play.

We will have a different focus each week, this week for the first week of school we were focused on learning to use the equipment and beginning to develop the social skills the students need. 

We have particularly been focused on "Stop, think, act" to remind us to stop and think about what might happen before we do something so we can make a smart choice. 

In the photos below you can see the children practicing these skills as they played together, shared the toys and took turns (I even overheard the phrase "stop and think" being used a few times by the children)

End of Year Celebration with Isleworth Kindergarten

Today the children and educators from Isleworth Kindergarten came to visit us in Team Awa. Usually on a Wednesday one group of our children go over to visit the Kindy to play with the children and to read them a story. This week to celebrate the end of the year, they came over to visit us. We had a play on the playground and with the big discovery things then the Kindy children sung some songs for us and we sung our Christmas songs for them. 

We were very luck because the children had baked shortbread cookies for us as a thank-you for our wonderful reading this year.