Other Events

We also had a busy social calendar with celebration luncheons happening around Leanne achieving her Bachelor of Education and  celebrating the special event of the Queen's Birthday. Both these luncheons were very well attended showing what a fantastic community we have here at Glamorgan Kindergarten.

We also celebrated the end of our fantastic term with a Funky Friday where everyone could come to kindergarten in some unusual attire and lo and behold there were also strange things happening. The puzzle table was upside down, shoes, handbags and rakes were hanging from different places inside and the teachers were acting rather strangely sending little bursts of water at the children now and again. Barney and his friends were hanging nonchantly from the swing beam and boxes were upturned and in different places.

The fantastic potters of Glamorgan

Term two 2012
Another busy term which passed very quickly and once again I am behing in the blogging department but will try and catch you all up on what happened for us.
At the end of term one Chrissy and I attended a very exciting workshop around working with clay and as we have wanted to provide more opportunities for children to work with this marvellous natural material we discussed with the other teachers ways in which this could be facilitated and in the end it was decided to set up a table in the art space along with displaying intersting pieces of pottery to provoke conversations with the children who visited the space.
Some children of course discovered the clay immediately while others took the whole term to find it and by this time we,the teachers, had noticed that we had some very exciting creations being made.We continued to only provide clay with little sponges as we wanted the children to experience and explore ways to work with clay and we also wanted to introduce what we called clay speak. Terms such as rolling, coiling, pushing, squeezing, pancake making as for us this wis what working with clay is all about. When one introduces more tools etc into the mix some children never really touch the clay.
The interest continued until nearly the end of the term with children returning time and time again and bringing their ideas, their current interest such as making dinosaurs, birds, dragons just to name a few.
We were delighted with the extension of skills that we noted and the dispostions of persistence, resilence and  and resourcefulness that the children showed. Certainly links were noticed to  Guy Claxton's  dispositions identified in his book 'Building Learing Power". Yeah. Fantastic.

Happenings in Term One 2012

A little late getting into the blogging thing again but here is a update of what happened at Glamorgan Kindergarten during the first term of 2012. As usual the term got off to a real bang with everyone celebrating Waitangi Day in our own special way. The children were encouraged to participate in conversation around why we do celebrate Waitangi Day and we made little kites - Manu iti - to fly and also wove some fantastic paper tipare which led into our main focus for the whole term.
Weaving that is. What can we say about this except that with the exception of five children, participated in some form on weaving that permeated the kindergarten curriculum. The children and the teachers wove headbands, used little weaving frames of a variety of types, delved into flax weaving, wove God's eyes using sticks and even tried our hands at weaving hair ([plaits in fact).
The learning and development was marvellous as children extended their skills, developed resilience and persistance in completing their weaving and also worked together on group weavings thus developing collaboration skills.
The teachers were certainly challenged at times by the sheer number of children who wanted to take part but quickly realised that learning to wait was also important and literacy opportunities such as writing one's name on a list could be used. Lots of opportunities were taken up around maths concepts such as over and under, counting threads and numbers of colours used, length of threads etc to name just a few.
We were very fortunate in being able to provide the children with the opportunity to see woven mats and bags from a different county - Tonga by courtesy of Olivia's dad and grandmother. Sef shared some insight into the Tongan culture with us all which was lovely.
We now wonder where this interest will go next term. Will there be some children who want to revisit it or perhaps have noticed different forms of weaving while on holiday. Certainly some of the teachers will have been very aware of different woven bits and pieces while on break.