Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 31 Body and Health!

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 31

Body and Health!

We started the week with making the look-alike dolls with the rest of the class as not everyone had made one in the previous week. Projects like this take time as the children are encouraged to make individual choices regarding the hair and the clothing and they need help with cutting and gluing.

But they learn so much along the way - from using their imagination and creativity, improving their fine motor skills to expressing their feelings and implementing the vocabulary for body and clothes.

The children understand that we need to be clothed for warmth and protection and they were very eager to dress our many dolls in the classroom. Even though most of the children can dress themselves now, putting clothes on a doll is still a difficult task. But they tried again and again and really started to manage well. 

The children also took good care of the dolls by feeding them as they know that good food is important for our health.

Then Mamoru noticed that one of the dolls did not look too well (it had a scratch from a red marker on the head) and probably needs to go to hospital.

Clues like this give me as a teacher the opportunity to expand knowledge, so we looked at an interesting German picture book called "Gute Besserung " that shows scenes of visiting a doctor and even experiences in the hospital.

The children were very intrigued and when I asked them if they wanted to go and see a hospital, everyone said yes. Therefore we went on an exploration walk to the nearby Rokko Island hospital and looked at the entrance where the children learnt that a cross very often marks a hospital. 

Luckily everyone was healthy and well, so we decided to make good use of our bodies by dancing and rolling on the Sheraton green hill. The joyful expressions of the children says it all!

On Tuesday we talked about sports and how healthy it is for our body. When Malin said that her brother plays soccer (Michel spielt Fussball) and the rest of the class (including the teachers) loved that sport, too, we decided to pay the nearby Kobe Ladies Football Center a visit.

We are so lucky to have the training ground of the fantastic ladies team right next door. The children watched attentively as the ladies dribbled, ran and scored and we agreed that we would practice ourselves on a cooler day.

In the next days the children showed that they had learnt a lot about the bodies by drawing them using a doll as a model. I am just in awe of the drawing skills that our 2 and 3 year olds have.

The children are also very skilled sculptors, using play dough for modelling bodies, heads and faces.

Bravo, Pre-Kindergarten children for being so creative !

On Friday then, the children attended the DSKI Sponsor run with their parents on the Green Field and they all did a fantastic job. Everyone was smiling, including the weather god, who brought us cooler, cloudy weather instead of rain and scorching sun.

What a great run, everyone !

Oh….and something else happened this week, which was such a surprising experience for the children to witness. One of our boys had brought a caterpillar from his garden, which had cocooned for several days and then turned into an Ageha butterfly over night !  

The children now have learnt that bodies do not only grow, but they can also change completely in animals. 

And they need a lot of food for healthy growth !

We will use this discovery as the basis for our next week’s learning. 

Thank you to Masahiro and his parents for giving us the chance to witness this special event of a metamorphosis. 

And yes, we did let that beautiful butterfly fly out into the wide world! 

Have a restful weekend or enjoy the lively atmosphere of the 50th Kobe Matsuri on Saturday or Sunday!

The 50th Kobe Matsuri / Festival

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Playgroup / EY GFL

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 30 On the Move!

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 30

On the Move!

The many conversations last week about the activities that the Pre-Kindergarten children do with their families provided a great opportunity to focus on movement and the body this week.

The children understand that they need their legs for walking, climbing and riding a bicycle or tricycle as well as their hands to hold onto things, but we wondered if they really knew a lot of the vocabulary and the right position of their body parts?

We started with a popular song called “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” and it was no surprise to see that most children knew this song and enjoyed moving their hands to the rhythm, but a slow version of the song revealed that the children actually point quite randomly to their body parts. 

Head, shoulders, knees and toes

After some repetition, everyone managed quite well and we moved on to a hands-on game, namely rolling a ball in a sitting position to a friend of a choice. 

This is a multi task activity: sitting, choosing, focussing, speaking, gripping a ball, rolling it and then listening to the cheers of the friend receiving it. Yes, a lot of senses involved in the good old ball rolling game. 

Tuesday was the perfect day for more “Hands-on” activities. With all of the EY teams we went to the nearby Rokko Island field to plant sweet potatoes. Even though I had talked about potatoes and shown some in the morning, the plants looked very different, just a green stem and leaves and no roots, so the children put them in the earth and then “harvested” them again and again.

After the third planting (lol), we said goodbye to our K1 and K2 friends and Ms.Kameda and the other nice ladies from the Rokko Island Beautification team and went to the Green Field. On the way we took time to smell the beautiful flowers.

Once on the field we used our bodies and lots of energy to practice running laps for our Sponsor's Run on Friday. The children showed great enthusiasm and did a good job running. Plenty of water ( yes, we brought the water bottles along) and hats kept us fairly cool. 

Still, after lunch everyone got an ice cream treat which was well deserved considering all the activity that had happened in just one morning.

To learn about their body in a creative way, this week the Pre-Kindergarten children also started a new art project with Ms.Anita who is very fond of recycling those beautiful leaflets of the Fashion Museum exhibitions. 

The children coloured one side of a gingerbread man shape cutout in original colours and then put a collage on the other side. 

This school year my idea of using photographs either for the classroom displays or for many of the children’s art work, proved extremely popular. The little paper dolls are very cute and show a lot of the owner’s character:

“I have black hair, so I need black wool. Ich möchte einen Hut mit Blumen, I want to put a butterfly ribbon, I like pink shorts and a sparkle on my T-shirt, I have short hair, but I want long hair” are just some of the comments the children made and show their ability to express themselves verbally and with creativity.

When all of these charming look alike dolls are finished, we will put them on display and later make a mobile version. Stay tuned for updates !

On Thursday we went shopping for a future unit activity which will involve making an easy treat. Before that we will learn a bit more about the body and also the face !

As it was raining on Friday, the Sponsor Run was postponed to the next week, which enabled the children to enjoy another long awaited Sports lesson with Ms.Miho and practice a little more for the Sponsor Run as well as the movements for the song Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.They also had fun on the parcours climbing equipment using all of their body,  their sense of balance and a little help from Ms.Chinatsu and Mr.Lubin.

What a great week with lots of movement and moving along with our subjects !

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Playgroup / EY GFL

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 29 Families- Love and Fun together !

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 29

Families- Love and Fun together !

The Pre-Kindergarten children have become very talkative and one of their favourite subjects is their families.

Often the first word a child says is “Mama” or “Papa” or the equivalent in their spoken language, as the parents are usually the first primary caregivers in a child’s life and the centre of their universe.

When I created the Pre-Kindergarten curriculum many years ago, I choose the sequence of my unit subjects which became 1) Colours & Shapes, 2) Animals & Food, 3) Body and Family for many reasons and in consideration of the developmental stages and level of speech of a child.

While a 2-year old child might be able to say the names of the family members at the beginning of the school year, he / she is much better equipped towards the end of the school year to elaborate on family relations and their feelings with increased vocabulary.

So there was quite some talk about exciting Golden Week holidays spent with family and friends and memories of the Sports Day together. There was also lots of excitement about the planned trip to the Kobe Nunobiki Herb Garden with the parents.

We started the week with a charming song in German about the love for one’s family and the children very much liked the video which depicts all kind of situations in a family setting and features the grandparents as well.

Das Familien-Lied

When we told the Pre-Kindergarten children that it will be Mother’s Day soon and asked them whether they would like to make a beautiful paper flower for their mums, the children were all smiles. So they patiently folded crepe paper in a colour of their choice, used lots of cello tape and were very proud of their result. Rightly so, because the flowers were adorable. 

The children had started a week before with making another gift for their mothers which involved many steps: choosing bottle caps, gluing them together, writing a card and finally packaging. The children were thrilled to make the original flower shaped coasters for their mums and we were not surprised to hear that mommies seem to drink a lot of coffee!

During the week we also had a photo shoot for the yearbook, a whole school emergency drill and a new friend join our Pre-Kindergarten class.

A heartfelt welcome to Kylie Miller and her parents, we are so happy to have you with us in Pre-Kindergarten and in the DSKI school community !

Kylie and her mother were also on board to join our fabulous excursion to the Kobe Nunobiki Herb Garden !

And what a fantastic day it was with a fun trip on the school bus, a thrilling gondola ride, beautiful views, colourful flowers, fragrant herbs, adventurous walking routes and full of sunshine, friendship and the love of our families!

We ended the day with a delicious picnic and the children handing their handmade presents to their mums who were very moved by the gesture.

Thank you so very much to all the parents coming along and for creating joyful memories with your children ! 

Wishing everyone a blissful weekend and loving Mother’s Day!

Yours, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Playgroup / EY GFL