Anna Hutchings Directors Report 19 November 2020
How amazing that we have reached the end of the year, a spectacularly different year, but a wonderful one none the less full of growth and learning.
My absence from Kindy due to ill health was keenly felt by me and I feel that I missed out on what is always the sweetest time of the year, when the children are so confident and are applying their full personalities and skill sets to creating and pursuing their own interests and learning. I am so grateful to our amazing team of educators who kept kindy gliding along seamlessly - what a lot of thought and effort that took and the results speak for themselves - when I returned, I found two classes of children who were incredibly content and had moved further along with their development. I am glad to be back.
So much has happened already this term and we have even more to come! Amazing learning and exploration took place including:
- rich show and tell sessions - a wonderful opportunity for children to share their experiences, to ask questions and to learn about one another and the world around them.
- the establishment of a Vet’s Surgery - many animal ailments were treated and healed including Coronavirus, broken limbs, rashes and tummy aches. This learning space provided fantastic opportunities for children to role play, share and develop their understandings, talk about and health worries and practice meaningful writing on medical charts.
- a visit from Kevin and his Reef Experience Puppet Show. He showed us many beautiful animals that live on the reef.
- taking part in the Aussie Backyard Bird Count - counting and identifying our local birds. Developing our understanding of our place and empathy towards the creatures we share it with.
- Bush Kindy at Kindy started up again and is being embraced by some children with lots of ideas including making a truck, a swing, doing some sawing, whittling, plaiting, drilling, discovering interesting warm-weather insects, making a fishing rod and even a slingshot (with safety checks in place). We are currently building a sign for the mud kitchen which involves sawing, painting, pouring cement and writing words - a great real-life skill-building and literacy experience.
- Our student teacher Lucy shared many wonderful ideas and created fabulous learning opportunities for the children. We made our own story stones using indigenous story symbols, again strengthening the children’s connection and understanding of our place and its long indigenous history. She organised several experiments involving chemical reactions where we observed what happened when you mix bi-carb with water, and Coke with Mentos! We played games to test and hone our throwing skills such as throwing beanbags through a sheet of corflute with holes cut out. Fun!
- we created a giant spiders web across the kindy that could support the weight of several children, sparked by an ongoing fascination with arachnids. This required much testing and utilising of rope tightening and tying skills developed over the Bush Kindy year.
- NAIDOC Week inspired many wonderful threads of learning. We looked at a map of Australia showing the approximately 250 indigenous language areas and found our own - Yuggera/Turrbal. We listened to a story from Yawuru country which was about “Wanggarranggarra”, meaning “spider”, “spider-web” and “fishing net”.
- We built cubbies and put on dance concerts - ballet and Frozen - learning about the rituals involved in performance and being an audience.
- Developing our hammering skills with more complex creations and projects - another real-life skill that builds confidence and a sense of capability.
- We created an outdoor “junk musical instrument” with suspended pots, pans and seed pods. Fun, noisy, encouraging experimentation with different tones, timbre, volume, hand-eye co-ordination. Moving body across the mid-line, an essential precursor to writing.
- Learning about body parts, making “bones” out of salt-dough which we cooked and then used across multiple days to make skeletons. Yellow Group is following on from this by making a bid chart with Yuggerabul body part names. Combining body awareness and understanding with the cultural heritage of our place.
- Aunty Sharon visited and shared more beautiful stories and music from Wiradjuri/Gamilaroi country. We love Aunty Sharon - she makes us feel happy and connected and part of our long history and this place.
- Jutta visited with her Butterfly Workshop, another fabulous, colourful and fun opportunity to build understandings about the local natural world, an essential component of taking responsibility for the environment. The life cycle of a butterfly is a compelling story and works as a foundation fur understanding the cycle of life in general.
We are looking forward to our excursion to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens where we will learn more about two familiar yet very different trees - the eucalyptus and the lemon. We will also soak up the wonderful sights, smells and sounds of this beautiful and oh-so-local place. The educators there weave indigenous understandings into their teachings which dovetails so nicely with our program at kindy.
The Christmas Party is coming up - how wonderful that we can have it despite this crazy year! The Committee, especially Sarah and Zoe, have done an amazing job in a very short space of time to get everything ready and checked off so that the children can enjoy the special occasion. Thank you to John for your magical contribution to the day too - the children will be star-struck!
Thank you to everyone for this incredible year. It has been like no other, but we made it.
