Keep up-to-date with your child’s learning with these short weekly updates from their teachers. Click on the buttons below to go straight to your child’s class, or find out what others are up to!
Kindergarten/Boronia Room
The rain may have made the environment wet and damp this week, but it has not affected the Kindergarten children’s enthusiasm for outside play or being together. Our new morning circle is “The Shoemaker and the Elves” and this week’s story was a traditional Winter favourite called “Stone Soup.”
The children are enjoying taking on the different roles and characters in the story of “The Shoemaker and the Elves” during morning circle. While we tell the story through verse and song the children move and gesture to the words. All our morning circle work is done together in a circle around the large mat that defines the heart of our Kindergarten room. It is a special and magical moment when we all know the words and the movements so well that we can move together in unison, almost as one!
During craft time the children are busy sewing a felt mouse with a single finger-knitted tail. The students are very keen to get this soft toy completed so that they can take it into their Winter play and build their mouse a cosy, warm home.
Have a cosy and warm weekend.
Francine
Class 1/2
King Winter has come to visit our school this week! Class 1/2 have been keeping our hands and hearts warm, caring for our friends, and stretching our skills.
We warmly welcomed Annie back to our gardening lesson on Monday! While we had been watering, weeding, and talking to the chickens as they explored the world, it was a joy to see Annie and Lew back home again. Annie and Class 1/2 cleared some weeds and repurposed an old t-shirt to make a weed tea bag that has joined bags made by other classes to ferment and eventually fertilise our garden. Pottering around in the garden is a wonderful opportunity for the children to breathe out, discuss any niggles and reconnect with friends after the weekend.
Returning to Dharug Language lesson with Amy after the break, I was pleased with the way children recalled our Welcome to Country, verbs, and animal names we practiced last term. This week Amy introduced the names of our body parts and then sang head, shoulders knees and toes.
Thank you to Julie, Lee, and Class 5 for joining our class for Craftanoon this week. Seeing the older children revisit craft projects they had completed when they were Class 1/2 not so many years ago was refreshing and a reminder of how quickly time passes. It was satisfying to see our leaders in action and how the gentle encouragement supported great progress among the younger children.
Our Main Lesson has provided opportunities for the children to make playdough pies to be shared into halves, quarters and eighths, round numbers, make crystal arrays and count produce using a variety of strategies. Making bread is another opportunity to discuss division as the children helped me to share the dough fairly between the class. So many opportunities to practice mathematical language and problem solving in our daily lives.
Stay warm and enjoy a relaxing weekend,
Kath and Class 1/2 Assistants
Class 3/4
“Above the ashes straight and tall,
Through ferns with moisture dripping,
I climb beneath the sandstone wall my feet on mosses slipping.”
~ Henry Lawson 1888
This week we continue looking at our Blue Mountains Main Lesson. We enjoyed daily handwriting with accompanying sketches of Henry Lawson’s epic poem about the Blue Mountains. The imagery is so rich in reflecting the natural environment we know so well, we almost take it for granted.
Handwriting has been very meditative and combining it with the dulcet heart felt rhythms of poetry, written and read aloud, is timeless scholarly and artistic delight. All students are doing this to the best of their ability whether it is cursive writing with ink pens, or rainbow pencils or a sharp lead. Some achieve 1 rhyming couplet in the time, others a stanza or two. All show pride for their efforts and take the task seriously with hushed concentration.
I have been writing an essay for my Art Therapy Masters exploring re-enchantment to time and place and spent the holidays writing poetry and artworks from lost, hidden, found and discarded materials. On Monday we looked about our classroom and looked at the usual with poetic eyes, writing a poem together called “Now.” The children then went on with the choice to extend this activity independently or work on their spelling. A pair of Year 3 girls asked if they could work together and completed a short story about a lonely sad teacup!
This slowing of pace and noticing of the beauty of the everyday before us, and honouring it, is so aligned with what we do at Blue Mountains Steiner.
The Viking enchantment lives so deeply in the class at the moment, that we are incorporating it into our craft with Viking long ship tapestries. This has provided grounding calm as we get back into the rhythm of Term 3.
If students have their own violins, please bring them every Thursday and students can leave them at the music room for tuning.
In PDHPE we started a unit on Lifestyle Choices. We started this by brainstorming all the things that are important to be healthy in our mind and body including sleep, movement, relationships, purpose, and hydration. This will be team taught between Pete and myself.
We also had our first Maypole Dance practice lead by Julie – is there anything sweeter than folk dancing children?! And our second whole class music lesson with Mare and circus skills again on Friday, with the delightful Stuart. Then Futsal Gala Day on Monday! Busy hands, hearts, and feet in Class 3/4.
Jeneva and Meredith
Class 5/6
Our class has been dancing a traditional Greek folk dance, doing stretch and strengthening exercises and reciting some entertaining poems. Times table are a staple, and the class are keen to get more fluent in the 7s, 8s and 9 times tables. A bit of encouragement to practice at home will help them to become faster with all their mathematics. Perhaps a good way to get to sleep (might be quicker than counting sheep!)
We have been drawing, writing, discussing, and listening to information about aspects of geology. Granite and its components (Quartz, Feldspar and Mica) that form parts of the earth’s crust where land is and basalt forming the crust beneath the ocean. The class wrote beautiful poems about volcanoes, altitudinal zones (a surprising topic for poetry) and there will be a few data collections and experiments.
Circus Skills with Stuart began last week and it was so great to see everyone’s skills being built on from the past years’ annual circus classes.
Every unit of work we teach has so many aspects. We follow the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) plus the Steiner Education Australia (SEA) curriculum. The art of designing our programs is to intertwine the content and the many layers of academic, arts and sciences et al: a fun but challenging task.
Notes have gone out for the Class 5/6 day bush walk (green note) and Class 6 Canberra excursion (pink note).
Have a lovely weekend,
Julie and Lee
