Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 9 Becoming skillful

Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 9

Becoming skillful

At DSKI the Pre–Kindergarten class is attended by the youngest children at school who sometimes have joined from my Playgroup where children from 1 year old can participate with their parents or caregiver in joyful activities that are fun and will foster their skills. 

Skills ? When thinking about skills, people have sometimes big ideas, but skills can be seen in seemingly simple actions.

When children are putting blocks on each other while playing, they demonstrate self–management skills including spatial awareness and helping to tidy up is a social skill. Listening to a friend and teacher is actually part of the communication skills and applying something that has been learnt like sorting fruits and vegetables and using these vegetables to make soup shows thinking skills.

Children acquire skills through a combination of observation, exploration, experimentation, practice, interaction and communication and that is why play– based learning and hands– on activities are so important for them to give them enough time and space to develop these important motor, language and social – emotional abilities. 

The PYP publishes a comprehensive chart featuring all the Transdiciplinary Skills.

So this week the Pre–Kindergarten children documented their budding math skills by counting acorns together and their good vocabulary and observation skills by naming a variety of fruits and vegetables and matching them to the correct illustrations in a beautiful book. 

The children further showed good gross motor skills by using colorful scooters and increasingly developed fine motor skills by cutting first fruit with a plastic knife and later by using scissors with good supervision and support. 

The Pre–Kindergarten children also worked on their thinking skills by reflecting how garbage affects the environment and oceans and their research skills when identifying familiar colours on a whole wall illustration featuring roofs in various colours. 

And throughout the week the Pre–Kindergarten children demonstrated good social skills by accommodating visiting friends into their classroom, playing with them and by sharing toys, laughter and friendship with new children who will become their classmates from November.

Thank you, dear Pre–Kindergarten children for being such a caring class and for showing such amazing progress in acquiring and honing new skills every day ! 

We are looking forward to exciting adventures with new friends and also parents during the Parents Cafe ( regarding German language acquisition in EY) Open Day, Lantern Crafting, our Pre–KG excursion, Sankt Martin and much more ! 

I wish you a fabulous autumn break and many opportunities to use and show your skills ! 

Kind regards, mit freundlichen Grüßen, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher Playgroup / EY GFL & Deutsch

German Saturday School homeroom teacher

Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 8 Colours and Shapes of Autumn

 Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 8

The Colours and Shapes of Autumn

Autumn in Japan is always still quite warm, with lovely sunshine and a myriad of activities to do! There are events galore from Sports and Culture days, Moon Viewing, Shichi–Go–San Shrine, Rice and fruit harvest celebrations as well as Autumn foliage festivities. 

Depending on what country you are from this season also incorporates Oktoberfest, Thanksgiving, Diwali, Mid–Autumn festivals, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos and others.

Autumn has many colours associated with it, mainly attributed to the different hues of the leaves ( yellow, orange, red, brown etc.) and shapes which can be easily distinguished . 

Even children can recognize a pumpkin shape and in Germany the shape of a hedgehog ( Igel) is ever present. This animal hibernates in winter and can be seen busily looking for food and sleeping quarters in autumn before its long sleep from November to March. Hedgehogs are protected in Germany and should not be touched or disturbed.

So to tune into some autumn fruit and vegetables, the children looked at their boxes of toy food in the classroom kitchen and started to sort them: all carrots together, then grapes, bananas, strawberries and lastly potatoes. Many of these have an easily recognizable shape and some of them are harvested in autumn. 

While we do not have any toy persimmons or toy sweet potatoes, we talked about them as on Friday we would go with the friends from EY to harvest them in the nearby field.

And what a great experience it was for the children! They first used shovels as the ground was a little hard and loosened the soil, then they pulled with all their might.

You can see from their faces how proud they were to harvest such big sweet potatoes. 

We are drying them at school and will make something yummy with them!

One of the pleasures of autumn is collecting leaves and acorns and you can make beautiful art with them. 

So this week we also went on an autumn exploration walk with K1 to the nearby park and all the children were overjoyed at finding lots and lots of acorns. They had a lot of fun on this outing and they worked together so well with some friends holding the buckets to bring the bounty back to school. 

The Pre–Kindergarten children would use these acorns and leaves for their amazing autumn Mandalas. They started by colouring the image using a big brush and autumn colours and then carefully positioned leaves and acorns.

 I fixed all parts with a glue gun for a stunning result and the children were very excited about their art work. 

For our autumn display the Pre–Kindergarten children also coloured some Maple leaves and showed good fine motor skills and an individual sense of colours. 

With the weather being so pleasant, we are looking forward to many more outdoor adventures in autumn ! 

Kind regards, mit freundlichen Grüßen, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher Playgroup / EY GFL & Deutsch

German Saturday School homeroom teacher

Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 7 Preparing for the Oktoberfest !

Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 7

Preparing for the Oktoberfest ! 

This week was leading to the DSKI Oktoberfest which was very exciting for our school.

DSKI being a school with a German background, the children always get to learn something about the traditions surrounding this festival.

The Oktoberfest actually started as festivities held in honor of the wedding between Prinz Ludwig von Bayern and Prinzessin Therese von Sachsen–Hildburghausen and it is now the biggest festival in the world. 

Viele Menschen kennen die Geschichte des Ursprungs des Oktoberfests, aber auch für kleine Kinder ist es immer wieder faszinierend zu hören, dass es eigentlich alles mit der Hochzeit eines echten Prinzen und einer echten Prinzessin begann. Mittlerweile ist das Oktoberfest nicht nur aus dem Terminplan der Münchner, sondern auch dem Rest der Welt nicht mehr wegzudenken. 

The children had watched a nice clip featuring some key scenes and vocabulary of the Oktoberfest and then coloured in the shapes of some traditional German clothes, a Dirndl and a Lederhose which we hung up together with all the colourful drawings of K1 and K2 on the wall in the entrance to greet the visitors to our Oktoberfest.

Oktoberfest für Kinder

Dear parents, please check your vocabulary skills: What is Dirndl, Lederhose, Hut, Riesenrad, Kettenkarussel, Achterbahn, Hunger, Wurst, Brezel, Lebkuchenherz, Oktoberfest? 

The children then tried to create some Oktoberfest scenes with the magnet shapes resulting in colourful huts, hats and play structures. 

On another day, the children took their box of colour sticks to the decorated wall and matched the sticks to the drawings showing that they can recognize same colours and name them. 

The Pre–Kindergarten also children helped with making some of the decorations by twisting light blue paper strips into loops and stringing them together with some cellotape.

This was a difficult task at first , but „Übung macht den Meister“ and we used the finished garlands to decorate the entrance board and Tombola table. A great job and amazing fine motor skills, dear Pre–Kindergarten children ! 

During the German lesson K2 also created colourful cardboard Brezels which added to the festive atmosphere in the entrance hall.

The Pre–Kindergarten children wanted to try as well and to make them understand what this traditional German bread called Brezel looks like we let them have a glimpse at the secret stash in the fridge. They will be so delicious at the Oktoberfest! 

Throughout the week the children practiced the dance for the Oktoberfest with all their friends from EY and they did such a good job! They also watched the older grades perform and cheered everyone on ! 

The Oktoberfest is a beautiful traditional festival and at our school the whole community comes together to celebrate it.

One of our Pre–Kindergarten fathers took the lead in the Oktoberfest Committee this year and we are all indebted to his unwavering commitment for the school. 

As the Tombola leader I have collected a fabulous array of prizes, so I am looking forward to seeing you, your families and your friends all at our DSKI Oktoberfest to celebrate together ! 

See you there ! 

Kind regards, mit freundlichen Grüßen, 

Anita Ursula Mönch

DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher 

Playgroup / EY GFL & Deutsch

German Saturday School homeroom teacher