To our Preschool Families

Hello Preschool families,

Can you believe we are half way through the year? Time flies when we are having fun and what an amazing journey it’s been so far. We are excited to start term 3 to continue with the preschool curriculum.

Term 2 curriculum aims had a big focus on social and emotional wellbeing, inquiry projects such as the road safety and care/respect for the environment. From implementing these aims, we created a kindness jar to fill with pom poms from our acts of kindness and promises to care for the land, water, people and animals. We reflected on our previous monitors from term 1 and decided to create 5 “agreement monitors” per day to empower each child to have a turn putting in two pom poms of an act of kindness they witnessed. We discussed with children what would they like to do when the jar is full and they said “dress up party”. We will continue to promote acts of kindness in the preschool room through this system for term 3.

Our road safety inquiry project has progressed wonderfully over term two, with the children enacting their rights as informed citizens to petition our local council for safety improvements in our carpark, and for a new zebra crossing to assist us in crossing the road safely on our beach and community walks. Through this inquiry project the children have been part of our “super safe super heroes” program, using their capes to fly to different rooms at Ada Mary to inform the younger children on how they can be safe pedestrians. This project resulted in a meeting and presentation to an engineer and two members of the transportation department from Port Phillip City Council. They were incredibly impressed with the knowledge the children had, and the efforts the children had made as part of the project. Each of our Preschool children should be proud of the contributions they made!

In term three our beach discovery program will be back up and running after some unforeseen disruption in term two. With the program recommencing, we would like to remind our families to pack additional and warm clothing on their child’s beach day, particularly in the cooler weather we’re having! Throughout term three we will also be engaging in a new garden project to encourage butterflies into our Preschool yard! Insects and creatures have continued to be an interest of many of our Preschool children this year, and we’re sure they will love the opportunity to see them grow and develop alongside our garden! With the children continuing to show interest in building and construction, we have seen them develop new and different ways to transfer water and cars from one area to another through the use of pipes. This term we will be supporting the children to extend upon their knowledge and understanding of this, using our recently acquired tool skills to support these creations.

As we move towards the end of the year, we will be supporting our Preschool children with developing their school readiness skills in preparation for their Prep year. These skills will cover self-care, emotional regulation, attention, concentration, language skills, play and social skills. Alongside this, we will be working closely with the prep teachers from the local primary schools to further support the transition of the children and to better understand the expectations for their commencement at primary school. If you have any question or queries on school readiness, please see the Preschool team.

We can’t wait to see what exciting things the children will be doing in terms three and four!