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