‘You’re off to great places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way’. Dr Seuss

Kindergarten are off and racing and have had a wonderful start to their school learning journey. They are settling into class routines and expectations and have been approaching learning tasks with great excitement and gusto!

They have enjoyed playing fun ‘get to know you’ games and have worked on developing friendships through developmental play opportunities. These learning experiences have formed part of their first unit of inquiry into ‘Who We Are’.

As part of this unit there has been a strong focus on developing the learner profile attributes of being caring and being a risk taker (trying new things).  Kindergarten are learning that it is okay to make mistakes and that making mistakes actually helps us to learn and improve. They have also been learning about the power of ‘yet’ e.g. I cannot read ‘yet’! It has been lovely hearing the boys start to use these words when talking about their learning and new experiences.

Kindergarten have been busy little bees learning how to work collaboratively and independently in literacy and numeracy activities. They have been learning how to read books independently, focusing on the reading strategies; ‘Eagle Eye’ (looking at the pictures) and ‘Stretchy Snake’ (stretching out sounds and then blending them together). In independent reading sessions, the boys have particularly loved sitting in the Kindergarten ‘Book Boats’.

There has been a strong focus on developing the boys’ phonological awareness skills. Research has shown that these skills are extremely important in order to develop good reading skills. Having good phonological awareness skills means that a child is able to manipulate sounds and words, or ‘play’ with sounds and words. By engaging in word play, children learn to recognise patterns among words and use this knowledge to read and build words. 

Kindergarten have been practising the phonological skills of: rhyming, breaking words into syllables, thinking about onset (e.g. ‘c’- cat) and rime (e.g. ‘at’ – cat), identifying initial and end sounds, segmenting words in sentences, and blending and segmenting sounds.  

Every morning we engage with the THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading and Spelling Skills) picture chart. English words are produced using a combination of 44 individual speech sounds called ‘phonemes’. These phonemes can be represented in writing using the 26 letters of the alphabet, either individually or combined with other letters. This approach to teaching phonics helps the boys understand that there are lots of different spelling choices (letters) that can make certain sounds.

In numeracy lessons the boys have had great fun making patterns and developing their counting skills using a variety of counting strategies, such as ‘line up and count’ and ‘move and count’. They have also participated in data collection activities such as; graphing their hair and eye colour and favourite ice cream flavour. Chocolate was a firm favourite!

We are looking forward to seeing the Kindergarten boys take off this year in great leaps and bounds and develop a love of learning. They are certainly on their way!

Miss Smallhorn – Kindergarten Teacher