Friendship

               
Friendship is a major part of all our lives, it can begin as early as preschool and last a lifetime.Today as I observed the children I noticed many special friendships that clearly increase the happiness and strength  of those within the friendship. When we have our friend close by we feel confident and excited by the world. We take chances, look for fun and share our true selves. Here we can see Asher and Sam putting themselves out there together and dancing in front of the whole group (24 children). How confident and happy they seem together....
  
                          


Another friendship that is quite noticeable is that of Aiken and Gracie... these two characters are best buddies. They know a lot about each other and thrive in small group settings when they are together. They support each other during rest time and can be heard throughout the day engaging in reciprocal discussions about many interesting topics including.... but not limited to... the benefits of having a pet Piccachoo, how awesome Nerf Guns are and the characteristics of lions and tigers.

Friends are why most children look forward to coming to preschool,. in many ways preschool is all about navigating and building relationships... In the mornings Amelia can be heard talking about all the friends she hopes to see that day... Tegan, Tilly, Summer, Tamryn just to name a few. Friendships do not happen easily and require each person to give a lot of themselves to another, as a friend you are expected to listen, lead and be lead, comfort, support, encourage, trust, share and of course take turns at being the mummy/daddy/baby, policeman/fireman, pirate/fairy and/or good/bad dinosaur. Friends know each others favourite games and toys they know how to cheer each other up and make each other so excited that bursting is a possibility...



Finally we can see in this photo one very large friendship group to which each child belongs. We care about each other, support each other, share and know a lot about what games and toys we like most. We especially liked pretending to be puppies today after our visit from an adorable Cocker Spaniel ;-) It was a great feeling to get down with all my friends and put myself out there and sniff the ground...

The Telescope Car Launcher

From our observations of how popular jump cars are and how exciting throwing things of the Fort is we decided to try adding a 'launcher' to the Fort. This also came about from our discussions on Mary Poppins and how fascinated the children are with the Admiral and Chimney Sweeps cannonball battle. This morning I set about attaching this recycled piece of pipe to the top of the Fort rail. Firstly Aiken noticed me up on the fort and said: "Erin why are you up there thats only for kids, your too big" Well to his surprise I decided to slide down the slippery dip. He thought that was very funny... Now where was I.... ok so I am attaching the pipe when Obi approaches and begins climbing up.. with haste I might add... to see what I am up to, he exclaims excitedly 'a telescope, look guys we have a telescope' He then proceeds to look through the pipe, he is happy to find that it moves.




Next Malu and Conan climb up to the Fort with their cars in tow, Malu walks straight over to the telescope and runs his car through it watching as it launches and lands on the ground below, satisfied he slides down to repeat the process again. Conan also runs his car through the telescope...funny how it is no longer a telescope but a car launcher... Conan's car is much larger and has three cars attached so it goes zooming out the end of the 'telescope' and lands with a crash... We all exclaim 'woah' and I race of to get more cars to launch and some bean bags. Obi and Samantha discover that the telescope can also launch bean bags... what a fantastic piece of equipment this pipe turned out to be.



We were all having so much fun launching things out of the telescope pipe that we may have forgotten how to share and take turns, why is it when something is so exciting children tend to forget about those who are sharing the experience and making it such fun? The trouble began with a certain train of bigger faster cars....Conan and Malu, our jump car pro's are such good friends and mean each other no harm but it is hard when they both want the same car and the telescope at the same time..... My oh my.... well we all had to stop our fun while the two friends 'negotiated' and that is putting it nicely.. the outcome was that neither got the car and the telescope was abandoned.... perhaps this will be a lesson they will use the next time we play telescope jump cars...



Play provides children with a safe and familiar context to explore their interests, develop friendships, and build on their understanding of others. Through play children build friendships and learn how to maintain play with others, they build on their ability to share, negotiate and express ideas. Play provides children with skills for life and we as educators can create meaningful play situations for children to explore and develop these skills.



The addition of this simple piece of pipe created an exciting play situation that appealed to several children, they used this play setting to explore their imagination and test out ideas - will my car fit through here? This play experience built on Obi and Malu's friendship and provided Conan and Malu with a safe context to test their negotiation skills.

Mary Poppins

       

        

Recently I was inspired by my cousin, who is also a teacher, to do a Mary Poppins Performance. I was interested to see if children from generation 2000 are still entertained and interested in this classic musical. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they are all very interested....

  

We are lucky to have technology in our preschool, we use the projector and laptop to share images and short films. The large screen is quite impressive to most of the children and often can be a little bit distracting when we are trying to communicate about what is occurring on screen. This was a problem when introducing Mary Poppins, we tried to get the children to engage with the technology and respond to the film through dance and movement. They were so transfixed with the dancing and singing on screen that they did not want to get up and groove themselves.... It was interesting to see some children say: "Look what they're doing now" and then proceed to copy.. this was precisely what we wanted them to do.

 

The song 'Step In Time' with the chimney sweeps is the most popular and we all love dancing to this. We freely practice the movements seen on screen including: Lift your Knees Up, Flap Like a Birdy, Over the Rooftops, Link Your Elbows and Bob your Broom'.... Mary Poppins how ever has a few refined dance moves and for these we need to line up and work with an educator, Helen demonstrated how to do some delicate heel toe movements and bopping with our hands on our hips.

Working towards a clear goal (a performance) as a group gives the children a strong sense of purpose and provides each child with an opportunity to contribute to a project. The final performance gives children a great sense of achievement, increases their confidence and allows them to experience the satisfaction of working as a group. Obviously this performance will allow us to practice many of the creative arts: dance, movement, drama and song....It will also build our knowledge of this era when we explore what tasks a chimney sweep had to do at work, what they wore and where they lived. We also hope to learn how to sing 'Supercalafragalistic' a very fast paced and linguistically complicated song...

Any contributions parents can make to costumes or sets would be greatly appreciated... We need lots of little brooms...