June News

We hope you had a great time with your child during the school holidays. The school was opened for Daycare children and they had great fun having longer outdoor play and the activities our teachers have planned for them like making Father’s Day card, clay painting and photo frame. You can see how much everyone in the school is enjoying the water table that we have put up in our garden too!.

Last month the children learned about Homes and Families and had a great time build three houses using different materials after listened to the story The Three Little Pigs. The Toddlers Group children also had fun making pig headband and they looked so cute wearing them. The Early Years Group children started to count by 2’s and 5’s and doing some addition with numbers. Since last month, we have started showing Toddlers Group children their names. As the teacher called out their names, they are able to tell very confidently.

Illness Reminder - This time of year can be overwhelming due to the Swine Flu attack. Pls read through the following and thank you for your co-operation.
1) Children with flu-like symptoms include: fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, or stuffy nose. must be kept at home for at least 7 days. Additional symptoms may be experienced with swine flu, including muscle pain, fatigue, and sometimes vomiting or diarrhea.
2) Children with flu-like symptoms must remain at home and not coming to school. For example, if a child becomes ill the night before school they must stay home.
3) If a child appears to develop symptoms of illness during school hours, the parents will be contacted and asked to pick-up their child immediately.
4) If a child contacts a communicable disease, the school must be notified immediately, as a notice is required for other parents to be made aware and keep a watch for signs of illness in their children.

We will be learning about Dairy Food in our classrooms this month. The children will learn sources of dairy products, types of dairy products while enjoying them, milk can be used to make butter, cheese, ice-cream and yoghurt, cows, goats and sheep provide milk. On a hot day nothing is better than an ice-cream treat! The children get to scoop their favourite ice-cream and sprinkle lots of toppings.

Preschool Group children are required to complete occasional homework activities based on the Letterland Blends and Diagraphs sessions they have in school. They are also expected to bring a booklet with spellings to learn at home. We expect the children to practise these every day and they will be tested on their spellings every week. Homework should never be a burden to parents and child. Ideally homework will give parents and children a pleasant opportunity to work together on topics they have learned that week in school.

Parent-Teacher Meeting - We would like to invite the parents to come to school for a Parent-Teacher Meeting. The meeting will be held for two days 6th and 7th July between 2pm-6pm. Your child’s work folder and progress report when we meet you. More details will be sent out next week.

May News

First of all, thank you for your co-operation during the last week with regards to the HFM. Our teachers will continue to monitor closely every day and will inform to parents immediately if there’re cases. The Teddy Bear picnic on 22nd April was enjoyed by everyone. We ate Teddy Bear biscuits and sang Teddy Bear song. Besides enjoying themselves, they also learned how to wait for others before start eating.

Families and Homes will be the focus of this month’s theme. We will be telling children stories of The Three Bears and The Three Little Pigs. Through this theme, the children will learn the members in a family, family members care for and protect us, discover activitites that families can participate in together, a home is a place to live, home workers, rooms in a home, kinds of houses and materials for building a house.

Some of our activities at school will include :
o Find a room for the furniture – The children can place the furnishings in the proper room.
o Group project – Building house made from different materials.
o Acting out the story of The Three Little Pigs.
o Culture Table : Science – Children may observe and examine building materials such as wood, brick, sand paper and tiles.

This month, we will also be talking about a very important person in children’s lives that is mums. For Mother’s Day, the children will be painting picture portraits of their mummy and these masterpieces will be displayed for you all to see! All the children will also have the opportunity to create an individually decorated card.

Maria Montessori

April News

As we are entering the second term, a lot of new work is being introduced to both classrooms. Water works and care of the environment activities have become very popular, such as water the plants in the Toddlers class and table cleaning, arranging tables and chairs after meals for the Early Years class.

In the Early Years class, the children are still trying to aim for academic excellence, with work on letter recognition, initial sounds, phonograms and sight words. They are developing their pencil grips steadily and they are doing their handwriting without ‘tears’ and with more confidence now. We also talk about the calendar during circle time every morning. With the help of Montessori materials, the children find abstract concepts and language skills easy to understand and remember. They are also learning to control their movements by walking instead of running in the classroom.

In the Toddlers class, there are several activities in the areas of colours, shapes, art. They have been busy learning about what are primary colours. They will be learning what colours they can get when they mix and play with the primary colours. We have also started to encourage the children to be independent to come up with their own art pieces using materials such as coloured papers, egg shells, fish scales, feathers, etc.

Since we started “Show and Tell” last month on Pets, the sessions have been very successful. We have seen a variety of objects and heard interesting stories about them. Through this process, the children are learning important communication skills such as speaking clearly, introducing themselves, offering descriptive details, preparing the information they wish to share, answering questions which are directed to them about the information they have shared, etc. Importantly, children are learning to speak in front of their classmates, which help to build their self-confidence. Please continue to support your child towards selecting objects and pictures of nature and culture to bring to school for “Show and Tell” on every Friday.

Our fun and fantastic theme for April is on Toys. Toys are more than for amusement as they profoundly influence many aspects of children’s lives. We will be looking into the origin of toys, types of toys even gran’s toys in comparison to present days. We will also learn about Malaysia traditional toys and be playing some Malaysian favourites such as seven stones, kites and spinning tops at school. We would like to inform you of one special day whereby the children will have a Teddy Bear picnic. Info will be sent out soon.

Mar News

Wow! With everyone settled in, we are looking forward to a wonderful peaceful March. Feb culminated with an enlightening tour to Tropical Spice Garden, to round up our theme on Plants. The children had a terrific time. It was so interesting to see a group of young children asking questions and learning the many new types of plants. Going on a field trip also taught the children how to behave on outings, care for themselves and friends.

We have been practicing handshakes. The children are learning how to shake hands, which hand is the right hand, and to make eye contact and smile when they greet someone. They are also learning one another’s names. We’ve been practicing our fine motor skills by cutting with scissors, stringing beads to make necklaces and bracelets. Our gross motor activities included tossing beanbags, throwing and catching balls, marching with musical percussions, doing the "Clap with Me", and of course, lots of music and movements. This month we will focus on children’s social skills such as sharing and taking turns.

We started to talk more about how and why we use calendars. On 13 Mar, we will be sending the calendars home for the Early Years children to finish as “homework” over the holiday. The calendars run from Jan – Dec of 2009. The children should finish writing the numbers and days. When they have finished, please help them to label dates they think are important throughout the year, like birthdays, holidays and special events. Please return the calendars to school on Monday after school break. We will be asking the children to share their calendars during our morning circle.

Our exciting theme in Mar will be Pets and we will be learning animal sounds, care of pets, body coverings and movements of animals. We will also be learning about occupation of people who work with animals.

At school
Some of the learning experiences during our Pets theme are :
· Creating a doghouse out of an old box for Floppy

· Show & Tell – The children can bring their stuffed animals to talk about them. If you are willing to bring your family pet to school to show the children, please let us know and we can arrange a time convenient for you and your pet.
· Listening to stories like Oxford Reading Tree - The Pet Shop, Me & My Dog, Tails are not for Pulling and Footprints.
· Pet Store – The children will be learning about counting and making choices.

At home
To develop fine motor skills, pls provide magazine for your child to cut or tear pictures of animals. These can be used to create an animal collage to hang in your child’s bedroom. Have fun with your child!

Dec Holiday Camp - Cooking Party

Does your child want to be Chef of the day? In Dec, we had a really fun cooking party for our school children as well as outside children for a week.

Who's the instructor? I'm proud to say that it's me. Yes! Another hidden talent that I have which is baking. The children, all between the ages of 5-12, grouped into two, have a great time creating and baking, as well as playing fun games, watching pastry and bakery videos and taking home some nifty treats!

We did a lot of prep work buying all the ingredients, cooking utensils, aprons sewn and pre-making our adequate mix of recipes - banana muffins, easy cheesy chicken dippers, cupcakes, cookies, crepes, pizzas, etc to ensure that everything will turn out well on the actual lesson. On the actual day, everything that the children do started from scratch. They weight, measured their ingredients, they made the dough and broke the egg all by themselves with little help from adults. It's time to get messy !

We had the children assembling their own individual pizzas - bowls of sauce, cheese and toppings were passed around the table and yes, I think some of the children weren’t really thinking that they’d be eating these as they piled on loads and loads of tomatoe.

They were so creative with their cookies and seemed to have a great time making little treats that then went into the oven marked with their name, and into goodie bags to take home after the party. We ended our cooking party with lots of party treats eg strawbery ice-cream crepes, melon skewers and jellies.

Feb News

What a great first month of school. We have been transitioning into new routines at school, learning everyone’s names, making new friends and getting to know each other. Currently there are 13 children in Toddlers Group ages 2-3 and 13 children in Early Years Group ages 4-6. The Early Years Group is under the guidance of Ms. Ng and I. She graduated with a Business Degree and has a passion in teaching. We look forward to an exciting year ahead with the children. You may have noticed there are 4 children attending our Junior Educare as well. One of them is Ms. Sri’s son. We are very delighted about this new addition to the school as we are providing this service to children whose primary schools are around the neighbourhood.

Our first theme was All About Myself. We discussed about our senses, how to take care of our teeth, how many fingers we have on our hands, where we are from and how old we are. In Montessori environment, there are some basic expectations we have for the children such as we tell the children “walking feet” means walk safely and calmly in the environment, “indoor voices” means use gentle voices, no yelling across the environment. We constantly remind the children not to disturb others who are working and return materials in good order to shelves.

We will start our second theme with the study of Botany by introducing Plants & Flowers. We use the book The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. It is a wonderful book to use especially for the younger children. Some of the activities planned for the children are, we will examine seeds, plant and compare different types of seeds, learn how seeds travel, learn how the stem carries water, learn the needs of plants, parts of plants and lots of art and crafts will be made with this theme. We encourage parents to participate with children by collecting different types of leaves and bring to school that we will press into a book.

To enhance our learning, the Early Years children will be going on a field trip to Tropical Spice Garden, Teluk Bahang Penang on Feb 25. The school does not have mass transportation so we rely on parent volunteers or teachers to transport our students to and from field trips. Further details will be sent out later on.