Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 24 Food for thought (and growth !)

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 24   

Food for thought (and growth !)

The Pre-Kindergarten children are continuing their discoveries about animals and food.

While acquiring more and more vocabulary, the children are slowly making connections between animals and food. 

One or two children had an idea of what certain animals would eat, but when we started to research more into animal food habits, there were lots of surprises for them.

They discovered that an elephant eats lots of different fruits, some vegetables and even sugar cane. Dogs and tigers strive on meat. Horses like apples, carrots and grass. 

Panda bears only eat bamboo, but amazingly brown bears are omnivores: They eat fish, small mammals as well as plants, berries and honey. (Note : Due to littering in national parks and the wild, they unfortunately also eat ham sandwiches and cheese slices.)

To add to our learning, we looked at another one of Eric Carle’s wonderful books called “My first book of food” where the children can see different animals and food by flipping pictures and ask (or being asked) whether this animal eats this type of food. It’s very educational and interesting and to make it even more fun we also used magnets of the book on the whiteboard in reply to questions.

On another day, the children tried to create some animal and food scenes with play dough. Even though it was Open Day and visitors came through our room, the children were completely absorbed in creating elephants, apples, pizza, butterflies, fish, snakes and more. Very popular was also to make footprints with our animal figurines.

All our Pre-Kindergarten children are good eaters and they cherish their food. We have been talking about the fact that food makes them grow, but it seems still a bit difficult for them to grasp this idea.

The children seem to understand though that the tulips are growing! We went to the nearby tulip field where the children had planted the bulbs in autumn and everyone was excited to find green sprouts.

Dette kitta….the tulips are there……growing!

So even though the children might not understand their own growth well, they can see the tulips growing and that is why it is always important to make many connections to the environment and give the children a variety of experiences.

I definitely can see the growth in the Pre-

Kindergarten children and I am so proud of them !

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 23 FAVOURITES !

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 23   

FAVOURITES !

This week we were excited to have had another new friend join our Pre-KG class and the extended group of friends played happily and shared some of their favourites.

Welcome to Pre-Kindergarten and DSKI community, little boy and family! 

The week started with Valentine’s Day where we show our favourite people how much we love them. 

Well, I think our Pre-Kindergarten children are very loving every day, but we took this special occasion to make cute and useful bookmarks as presents for the parents.

The children joyfully coloured their bookmarks and glued on a lot of hearts, so mum and dad (or grandparents, siblings and other favourite people) could use these presents for special reading occasions.   

I love books and as my favourite children’s book author is Eric Carle I presented the Pre-Kindergarten children (who are some of my favourite people ) with a placemat featuring the animals of the Brown Bear book which the children love so much.

They can use the placemat for Playdough or narrating or such and I hope it will remind the children of their learning and their lovely time at school.

We continued to talk about favourite animals and favourite food and it was interesting to see that some children stood by their choices and others had new favourites every day.

While the Pre-Kindergarten children are still discovering more new animal and food choices every day, they also continue to work on their classroom board. 

Two big favourites for animals that fly in the sky were the butterfly and the parrot, so the children created colourful flying animals with the triangle pasting technique they had learned about in their first unit.

For land and sea animals, they chose to put ducks and frogs, because this animal dwells in both places.

Stay tuned for more art and animals coming up !

As the children also seemed to grasp the idea of “favourite” which is part of the concept “perspective”. they voiced some favourite play choices which included a train set, feeding the toy horses and making a lot of different bentos.

PS. Expanding knowledge: Favourite means Lieblings…in German, ichiban suki na…in Japanese and favorita / o in Spanish !

Please talk about YOUR favourite animal and food with your child and we will ask the children about your conversations next week!

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 22 Reconnect, Recap, Recover

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 22   

Reconnect, Recap, Recover

What a week at Pre-Kindergarten !

First of all, it was a bit shorter than usual, so everyone had an additional day to rest, relax and recover.

Then, it was a week with some absences due to a cough bug going around (students & teachers) and then it was also a week of reconnecting with some friends who were absent previously.

The week gave great opportunity to rekindle friendships, meet some different teachers and recap some of the things learnt so far.

Still, Pre-KG is always moving forward, so the children decided on Monday that they really needed their own sky, land, sea box to play with at home!

Due to space management, we settled for the lids of the boxes. The children pasted the corresponding colours happily and checked out whether the stick puppets would fit.

After identifying their own favourite animal and food items, the Pre-KG children also started to practice their interviewing skills, which will come in handy for next week’s research project.

Of course moving to fun animal songs and learning new vocabulary was also on the agenda, so we include some of them for everyone to enjoy over the long weekend.

Jungle animal song

Animals in action

To all Pre-KG friends, parents and teachers recovering at home, a big odaiji-ni ! Stay healthy and well eat lots of good food with iron and vitamins !

See you later (alligator) ! 

(Not the old song, but the new one, lol.)

See you later, alligator (children's song)

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 21 Expanding horizons

Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 21   

Expanding horizons

After dividing their stick puppets and toy animals into 3 different categories ( air, land, sea), the Pre-Kindergarten children this week took a closer look at another category of animals, namely farm animals.

We have a pink little farm house on a classroom shelf which is very popular with the children and it is inhabited often by the farm animals of Noah’s arch next to it.

So the children started to ask about the names and as one of our girl’s knows the song “Old McDonalds had a farm”,  we watched a cute clip and sang along.

Next, I set up an area with many different types of puzzles  and a domino game as a provocation (IB PYP) for the children.

Quote: A provocation can come in many different forms, but it is always intended to provoke thoughts, ideas, and actions that can help to expand on a thought, project, idea or an interest. For instance, a provocation is an experience set up in response to a child's interests and ideas.

It was interesting that all the children went first for the HABA farm puzzles where the fun part was to poke the puzzle piece out with a finger. Slowly the children tried out other puzzles and challenged themselves with the domino. 

More and more questions were asked and it was good to see that the interest was great. The children asked to do all these puzzles again, so we made a similar set up on another day and again it proved to be a hit.

This week, our Pre-KG children also had a special experience as we went to the nearby Fashion Museum to see another fabulous art exhibition.

Regular visitors to my Pre-KG blog know by now that I am a very big fan of our local Rokko Island Fashion Museum which surprises me again and again with fascinating art exhibitions.

The artist this time,  Mr.Fu Yurukawa, crafts art out of huge pieces of styrofoam which he chisels into animal and other portraits.The canvas then is lit from behind showing the picture in fluorescent orange or blue. The effect is stunning and the children were fascinated by all the huge animals they could see.

If you visit the exhibition with your child again, please make sure to hold on tightly to their hands so they do not touch and coincidentally poke a hole into this art pieces.

But by all means, please go again !

Finally, during this week, we had a new friend join our Pre-KG class. There was a lot of excitement and the Pre-KG children were very keen to show the newcomer their toys and their learning !

Welcome to our class, little girl, we are looking forward to many new adventures we you!

Dear Pre-KG class, how wonderful to see you always so eager to expand your horizons!

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher