Graduation News A couple of weeks ago we said goodbye to our lovely friend Isabel. We are wishing you the best time at school! KOWHAI MONTESSORI PRESCHOOL Tui Classroom Newsletter – Term 2, June 2015 – No 16 Teachers News Monica is back from her 2-weeks holiday in Japan, and happy to see all the wonderful children. Its Rachael’s turn next week for her 2-weeks holiday in Tahiti. We are wishing her lots of fun and a relaxing time. Mio has finished the first semester of her study, and she will be with us everyday now Well done Mio! We also have two student teachers in our Kowhai community. Jennifer is in our classroom, while Annie is in the fantail class. | | | Term 2 Focus Update: Exploring our Senses Exploring our senses is always a fun topic to do with children. We have done lots of activities that support our five senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch), such as the touchy-feely game and tasting game. Next we will be making our own smelling jars. We like to thanks Siena and her family for donating lots of jars for us to use. If you like to know more about what we did and all the updates on our theme, please come and have a look at our “term focus” notice board next to our bathroom. Thank you First of all, we would like to say thank you to all of the Mums who came to visit us during the Mother’s Day Afternoon Tea a couple weeks ago. Thank you for taking the afternoon off to celebrate the special day with us. We hope you enjoyed the home-made crackers and chutney. The recipes for both the crackers and chutney is on our website. We also hope that you like the fingerprint necklace from your angels. Upcoming Event / Trip  Old MacDonald’s Farm visit  When: Tuesday, 23 rd June 2015 Time: – am Where: Kowhai Montessori Playground Note: Children that doesn’t normally come on a Tuesday are welcome to attend with parental/guardian supervision. We also welcome siblings.  Pumphouse Theatre: “Grandma McGarvey with Grandpa’s Slippers”  Note: The show will take place in the last week of the term, between 29 th June – 3 rd July. We are still checking on their availability, and will provide you with more information near the dates. Changes with our Food Preparation work We have decided to change our unhealthy milo drink work to a much healthier options of herbal tea work. With the new herbal tea work, children will have the opportunity to taste different kinds of tea. So far, we have tried chamomile, rhubarb & strawberry, and apple & elderflower tea. We have also experimented from using tea bag to loose tea leaves, and decided to put the two options on the shelf. Our children definitely like having the different options to enjoy the yummy warm herbal tea. We have also changed the type of spread we use for our toast work. Previously, we used strawberry jam for the spread. We realised that the jam contains lots of sugar, and therefore are unhealthy for us. We have tried chutney and pumpkin seed butter as spread. We will continue experimenting with other recipes on healthy spreads. Kids Jokes What’s black and white, black and white, black and white? A penguin rolling down a hill! Early Words Some of our older children have started on a special reading work called the “early words”. Early Words is a daily five minute individual lesson where a basic sight word vocabulary is taught. The child will learn to read words such as ‘is’, ‘the’, ‘look’ and so on, at both word and sentence level. These common words make up a large percentage of all reading. Therefore, the quicker the child learns to instantly read these words, the easier the reading process becomes. Our aim is to start our children with their reading early (while they are still in a relaxing preschool environment), and ease their transition to school. Because of this, we will only start introducing the programme when the child reaches 4½ years of age, or when they have mastered their alphabet. In saying that, we like to encourage you to use the phonetic sounds when introducing the alphabet with your child, instead of its name. Do come and talk to us if you like to know more about the programme or how to introduce the alphabet at home.