Pre-Kindergarten 2021/22/23

Friday, April 14, 2023

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 26 Fly me to the Moon - STEM week at DSKI!

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 26

Fly me to the Moon - STEM week at DSKI!

We had another exciting and very busy week at school, focusing on STEM this time which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Quote: The STEM acronym was introduced in 2001 by scientific administrators at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The organization previously used the acronym SMET when referring to the career fields in those disciplines or a curriculum that integrated knowledge and skills from those fields.”

The DSKI faculty had decided that we would take our school to the moon and the Pre-Kindergarten class, together with the rest of Early Years was in charge of making the rocket.

We started by reading a nice book to the children which is called Rocket to the Moon and talks about children making a rocket at home very creatively with household items. Then we looked at pictures and drawings of rockets and found many in our classroom pictionaries

After this the children excitingly made rockets and space ships in all forms and shapes with super size legos, duplo legos, magformers, cylinder blocks, cardboard tubes and they showed great creativity.

Together with K1 and K2, the Pre-Kindergarten children did some rocket experiments and made a rocket with paper cups and rubber bands which was so much fun.

The Pre-Kindergarten children also had a new friend helping with their rocket adventures.

Haruki Lucius joined our class and we would like to extend a heartfelt welcome to him and his parents.

Herzlich willkommen, lieber Haruki und Eltern, Frau Janaina Lilli und Herr Shohei Takata, wir freuen uns sehr euch bei uns zu haben!

During the week the children watched a short video clip in English and German of Peppa Pig (Wutz) going to the science Museum and the children got a real good understanding of what is happening on the moon.

A Trip to the Moon

They amazed us with statements like “ Nothing on the moon, so also no animals and rhinoceroses”, “The moon is so far, you need a rocket”, “What is that other round thing (a planet)” and much more.

The Pre-Kindergarten children were also absolutely fascinated by the German song “ Karl, der Astronaut” which shows very nicely and quite detailed the journey of an astronaut in a rocket from Earth to Moon.

Karl, der Astronaut

Even more insight was gained when the children could see that everything (food) and everyone (Karl) floats in space, that the moon is indeed barren and just full of rocks and craters and that you can see the Earth from the moon. (Ms.Anita, that green and blue one is Earth}.

Having become so knowledgeable, the children wanted to create a moon landscape and did a fantastic job using grey & brown paper and egg carton to depict craters and mountains.

They enjoyed putting their rockets there and the LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle) which I had bought.

Lastly, the class was getting measured by grade 3 to see if they would be fit to be astronauts and then got their part of the rocket ready, being the front where all the people would travel to space.

In the previous week we had painted our part blue, now we cut a window, put a name (DSKI 1 - Space Explorer), put on space suits and helmets and zoomed off into space.

The Pre-Kindergarten children had a blast with their rocket and later in the day we brought it to the hallway for assembling with the other parts. We also put our moon display there right in front of the poster where Ms.Anita could be seen with astronauts at the Space exhibition in Oarai.

On Friday then the rocket was a very big hit with the whole school during the STEM week exhibition.

The parents also came to admire the rocket and all the crafts and experiments we had done and they had a great time seeing their children experiencing the various games, don space helmets, do additional craft, look at the school on the moon and even take off for a flight simulation.

Thank you all for your time to visit and kindly deepen the subject with your child at home as the interest was great and level of understanding really amazing.

And after all the experiments at home, please enjoy a quiet evening when the children are asleep, listening to this oldie, but goldie from Frank Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra - Fly me to the Moon

Ich wünsche allen ein tolles Wochenende und viel Spass beim weiteren Raketen Basteln !

Herzliche Grüsse,

Anita Ursula Mönch

Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher

Playgroup / EY GFL

Friday, April 7, 2023

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 25 Frohe Ostern - Happy Easter - Joyeuses Pâques !

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 25

Frohe Ostern - Happy Easter - Joyeuses Pâques !

This week was the week leading up to the Easter weekend, so the Pre-Kindergarten children were busy making their Easter baskets, colouring Easter eggs and decorating the entrance to the Kindergarten area,

The children were very excited about these activities and could hardly await the arrival of the Easter Bunny on Friday who was informed by our PTA and brought some treats in lovely handmade bunny bags.

Thank you so much !

Easter is the most important and oldest festival in the Christian calendar and the message is a joyous one, but even for people who are not religious it can be celebrated to welcome spring and new life.

In Pre-Kindergarten we have two friends who will have a new sibling soon, so their families will grow.

The children really like to talk about their families and our classroom board featuring winter celebration food with family members is so popular that I would like to keep the idea, but feature some new pictures of the the children’s families doing some activity together.

As our previous unit was about “Animals and Food”, the children have become quite knowledgeable about various animals and even their habitats. They started to put together a variety of animal families and found out that we could have a very big herd of elephants, but were missing members of other families.

I took the clue and went to Daimaru Department store to buy some more Schleich animals, thankfully they had a big whale as well. The next day there were very happy faces all around!

Talking about animals gives us always a good opportunity to show their movements, so the children did some yoga poses and animal walking with Ms.Chinatsu using all of their body and many muscles. They even practiced the bunny hop for our Easter celebration and games on Friday.

Due to the rain, we changed our location from the planned green field to the MPR at school where we got together with K1 and K2 and had lots of fun singing, hopping and doing the egg run.

At the end of the day the children were so happy to take along their lovingly decorated Easter baskets, eggs as well as some sweet treats.

We also had a very special treat during snack time in form of a freshly baked Easter loaf which was kindly given to us by Sofia’s parents. Thank you so much for your kind gift, it was very delicious and I have a lot of good childhood memories with the Osterzopf.

As mentioned, spring is always a sign of new life (hence the symbolic eggs), so we also planted some cress in class with the seeds and eggshells provided by PTA. Hopefully the cress will grow nicely and we can put it on our salads or a buttered bread. Yum, yum - lecker !

This week was very busy again with a new friend trialling in our class and with Nicholas, who used to attend Playgroup, starting Pre-Kindergarten.

Welcome, dear Nicholas and Familie Sallstig, we are so happy to have you in class and in our DSKI community. Herzlich Willkommen und wir freuen uns schon auf viele Abenteuer zusammen!

On top of all these exciting things happening, there was one more activity which is related to next week’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Week when we are taking off to the moon.

The EY are making the rocket, so under blue skies, everyone listened to a space adventure read by Ms.Pam and then the Pre-Kindergarten children painted their part of the rocket with lots of blue paint.

They did such a fabulous job, working very diligently and they were quite fascinated by the brown cardboard slowly turning a vivid blue.

Good job, Pre-Kindergarten!