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!
Preschool
Wattle Room
The children have had such lovely opportunities to spend time in our veggie garden in the past week. They have been planting seedlings, weeding and harvesting vegetables to use in our weekly menu. This unhurried exploration and harvesting work is meaningful to the children and reflects “the necessity of being in free nature and living with the natural rhythms of the Earth” (Mitten, 2009). It is also rewarding to see the fruits of our labour (excuse the pun!) when we end up eating the delicious food we have grown! We had such an abundance of squash and other vegetables that the children went for a walk over to the Primary School to deliver some of the fresh produce to the Harvest table in preparation for their St Michael Autumn Festival.
Boronias
The Boronia children have been embracing the change in seasons and heralding the beginning of Autumn. They have been lovingly collecting the most beautiful autumn leaves, which has led to lots of impromptu craft. The children were using wooden skewers to thread leaves and make colourful sculptures. The Boronias also helped to construct a push mower this week, using the instruction booklet and screwing the pieces together. They were proud of their accomplishments and took turns to mow the playground lawns. Such joy was found in a job that most people see as a chore!
Lesley and the Preschool team
Kindergarten/Boronia Room
This week in the Kindergarten we have been deepening our Autumn themes as we begin to approach and prepare for our Autumn Harvest Festival, set for Wednesday 9th April at 10am.
On Monday we painted with Autumn colours, so with the help of yellow and red swirling around on the page, the children were able to make many different shades of orange and gold.
On Wednesday, I told the story of “Johnny Appleseed”, who walked the land planting apple seeds and growing apple trees as he went. The children made red beeswax apples during beeswax time the day before, so we filled our wooden tree with these apples to feature in our story this week.
We continue work on our sewn Autumn leaves and finger knits for our small Autumn baskets during craft time. These Autumn hand-crafted pieces will be ready in time for our Harvest Festival on the last day of term.
We are looking forward to family and friends joining us for our end of term Autumn Harvest Festival.
Warmly,
Francine
Class 1/2
We are so proud of our Class One Gnomes and Class Two Meteors! They were courageous and performed beautifully at our St Michael Autumn play. Thank you to all the families who donated food items and the children who made cards. We are so fortunate to be part of this generous community.
We have been fortunate with the weather this week and made a visit to the pine forest to explore our beautiful surrounds, climb trees and make fairy wands.
Our new Mathematics-based Main Lesson has begun, King Maximo and the Number Knights will carry through until the end of the Term. The children began by exploring the quality of ‘whole to the parts’. Making one golden ball of clay and dividing it slowly into twenty small ones. This is very much in keeping with the Steiner teaching principles of discovering the wholeness of something before we start deconstructing it into fragments or parts of itself.
Class Two are rising to the challenge of discovering shapes such as the twelve-pointed star via chalk, crayon and wool. Class One are becoming more familiar with numbers and are exploring their qualities and where we can find them in nature.
Enjoy a lovely, relaxing weekend!
Warmly,
Kath and Class 1/2 Assistants
Class 3/4
Class 3/4 have had a busy week with play practice, and we are like professional performers by now.
We had lots of fun hearing an Alaskan story about a little girl who was wondering if her mama would love her no matter what. Even if she dropped the ptarmigan eggs or put salmon in her mama’s parka or turned into a musk ox or ran away and stayed away and sang with wolves and slept all night in a cave! And guess what, her mama would love her forever and always no matter what.
We also made beeswax dragons and treasure maps with “Here be Dragons” on them. We scrunched them up and rubbed dirt into them and even burnt the edges to make them look old! So much fun.
We are about to start a new main lesson on Grammar, with lots of stories about all the characters that work together to make words work.
The children are noticeably more settled in work and play after many weeks of class chats. It is wonderful.
Have a lovely weekend.
Jeneva and Meredith
Class 5/6
The classroom has been a busy one this week. We’ve crammed a lot in: play practices, maths, spelling, drafts of our own writing and publishing … and the final NAPLAN test happened on Tuesday.
The townsfolk embraced the play with fresh enthusiasm. Reeder as the King and Molly as the Queen as well as Lohan as St Michael and Hannah as Sophie all brought magic to their roles. The class musicians did a fantastic job of holding the play together. The children have worked very well towards the performance and Lee and I are very proud of them. They have received any artistic suggestions with generosity and enthusiasm! They’ve been great!
We’re busily sewing elephants which are connected to our India Main Lesson. We’ve been looking at decimals and their values, in relation to fractions.
Working with ACTUAL money occurs a lot less, since we all have plastic cards. Getting some good old fashioned, yet highly relevant (and reliable) cash is a great way for the children to understand how money actually works, how to count up to a certain amount when giving change etc. I’m always surprised how many children aren’t familiar with cash, but actually why should I be? It’s the times we live in …
Have a fabulous weekend,
Julie and Lee
