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