In this edition
Welcome back to Term 2
Dear Families,
At the Early Learners’ Centre, we believe that children have the right to be educated with current and cutting-edge technology. They have the right to access technology and be aware of the endless possibilities that await. We view technology as one of the hundred languages of the child, the endless number of children’s potentials, their ability to wonder and inquire. We maximise learning opportunities and effectively utilise digital technologies as a social connector, moving away from a one-to-one device scenario, to one where we use technology as an interactive tool to be used by numerous participants.
At the end of last term, the children warmly welcomed back Ada, our Humanoid Robot, from her holiday in Paris. The children have invited Ada into their playrooms and have displayed innate curiosity and wonder towards their new friend. They have begun sharing their questions, wonderings and theories and these are being documented by the educators for further exploration. The children’s interactions with Ada so far, have highlighted their developing empathy and compassion for others as they have begun to question and share their concerns towards her sleeping arrangements and worry of her ‘hurting’ herself. The children have shown great care when interacting with Ada and have encouraged each other to interact positively and carefully. They are eager to further develop their understandings surrounding Ada and learn more about her features and functions. Children are sharing their theories about what her features are for and how they are to be used successfully. The children are beginning to recognise their responsibilities towards Ada and the different ways they can interact with her.
What is a Humanoid Robot?
Ada is a programmable humanoid robot designed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French robotics company headquartered in Paris. Ada is a personable and interactive robot and her humanoid shape and body movements give her life that make her truly endearing.
Each week I have the absolute privilege to meet with Kate Mount and Melissa Bray, the School’s eLearning Integrator. We engage in rich dialogue sharing the children’s experiences with digital technologies, in particular those with Ada, and together we analyse the data and synthesise pathways for further discovery. Each week Ms Bray challenges the thinking of the educators and encourages us to be brave and creative in our approach. Ms Bray conceptualises our work with Ada as finding humanity through technology, as the children develop empathy/emotional intelligence, identity, social cues, leadership and build connections through their inquiries. In the holiday break, Ms Bray gave a presentation to the ELC educators which she delivered at a conference earlier this year, highlighting the children’s explorations and learning with Ada. She challenges us to move the children beyond passive consumption of technologies, towards an understanding and mindset of manipulators and creators of technologies.
An exciting element of the children’s explorations is that they are beginning to break down the stereotype that is often portrayed in the media of the robot vs the human, and rather embrace the robot as the way of the future and a friend. These sessions with the robot are challenging the thinking and understandings of the educators as the students begin to think outside the square and pose questions and provocations for further inquiry.
As the children and educators are developing their questions and theories so are you, their families. We invite you to share the conversations you are having with your children about Ada and any questions you have that may deepen our inquiries. I invite you to share these conversations by either emailing me at kporplycia@stpetersgirls.sa.edu.au, having a chat with me or sharing with your child’s class teacher.
Kirsty Porplycia
ELC Teacher
Term 2 Dates
May 12
Mothers’ Day afternoon tea 2pm
June 5
Mid-Year Reception visits commence
ELC New Parent Information Night 7pm
June 18
Ladies’ Day Out
June 26
Hat Ceremony
July 3 – 24
Vacation Care program
A letter from Miss Qian
亲爱的家长：
欢迎来到Term 2！我们希望您和孩子度过了一个愉快放松的假期！
本周末我们即将迎来母亲节，圣彼得女校ELC也在本周五下午为所有的妈妈准备了下午茶和亲子活动，我们准备了小零食还有一些小活动供您和孩子参与，相信您和孩子会度过一个愉快的下午。所有ELC孩子的妈妈，或者祖母以及重要的家庭成员或者朋友都可以参加哦！
为方便统计人数，我们准备了报名表，请您在孩子所在班级的签到处留下名字和人数，我们等着您的参与哦！
时间：本周五（5月12日）下午 2:00
地点：ELC
Miss Qian
New Parent Portal
As you may have seen last Friday, the School has launched an exciting new Parent Portal, myLink. It draws together a range of useful information that’s available at your fingertips. ELC parents can enjoy a greater insight into their child’s day-to-day learnings. You can also access your child’s ePortfolios via the portal. On the myLink Welcome page, there are various user guide videos, including this one specifically for ELC parents:
So please be sure to log on to myLink, have a look around and keep coming back to view the latest updates from the ELC. If you have any queries or need assistance, technical support is available. We hope you enjoy using myLink!
Year 11 Research Project
Do you have a child aged 4 – 12 years?
Currently, our Year 11 SACE cohort are engaged in individual Research Projects that investigate self-selected topics. Students are encouraged to use authentic research processes to gather information from real sources. One approach they can use is developing and distributing surveys to a specific audience.
This year, Therese Kemp has chosen to investigate the impact of media on young children and created a survey that focuses on parents with children in the ELC to Year 6.
She has independently developed her survey through SurveyMonkey and is now seeking your support. Her investigation explores the psychological, emotional and physical impact of media.
All responses are anonymous and will be used only for the purpose of Therese completing her Research Project. Through her research, her aim is to apply the knowledge that she gains to develop and implement strategies to encourage families to use media more effectively.
Please follow the link attached.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/K39VTDL
Your support is appreciated.
Save the date
Sunday 18 June 2017
Ladies’ Day Out at Barristers Block Winery, Woodside
$60 per person
News from the Stonyfell Room
As we delve into Term 2, we are eager to follow on from last term’s inquiry into identity. The children have given many provocations for further investigation and the educators have documented these and begun relaunching to take our learning deeper.
Each of us has a story and as we move through our lives our story is built upon as we learn new things, engage in experiences and interact with others. One of our learning strands this term is supporting our children to share their story with us. Our role as the educators is to offer multiple opportunities and experiences for the children to be able to do this through their hundred languages. These experiences might include artistic expression, music, dance, storytelling or the sharing of photographs from home.
The creation of the ‘identity cards’ has been a powerful tool for the children to begin sharing their story and stories of the special times that they have shared with their loved ones outside of the ELC. Another aspect of these cards has been their connection to the Stonyfell Room, children and educators. The identity cards have supported the development of the children’s communication skills as many have been eager to share these with others. We have observed children showing interest in the cards of their peers and will seek out interaction which might simply be sitting next to a friend and pointing to all the photographs. We are respecting the children’s desire to tell their stories differently. We have observed the children delight in seeing themselves and they have been eager to share these with their families.
The educators have observed the role that emotions have on who we are and how we express our stories to others. We are exploring emotion in many ways and we are using our Dance and Art lessons as a language for expression. The educators and I work closely with Caterina Pennestri (Art) and Eva Simitsis (Dance) to analyse observations and develop experiences to further enrich the children’s explorations. One of these experiences has been to take photographs of the children displaying various emotions and we have been using these in conjunction with a range of children’s literature to deepen their understandings of emotion and feelings. We know that if our children begin to understand the role emotions plays in their lives, this will support their ability to self-regulate and build their resilience.
Laura Reiters
News from the Bell Yett Room
Welcome to Term 2 in the Bell Yett Room. Before we began the term, we spent time looking backwards in order to move forward. We reflected on the rich learning and positive developments of the children during Term 1 and analysed what had supported this. Amongst many, there were two things that stood out to us as having an impact on our teaching and learning:
• Our investigations of ‘the hand’ provided a context that invited them to engage in the learning experiences and develop relationships with one another.
• The focus on the development of social skills that enhanced our ability to function as a group and brought us together as a learning community.
We wondered, how could we enter a new term with this knowledge? We planned that our inquiry of identity is shaped over time, with a variety of learning contexts in the hope that the children would feel the same strong connection to them as they did to exploring their hands. We decided that a focus on communication skills would build on their social skills and enhance their learning.
We have been inviting the children to share their stories of themselves, beginning with their recollections of themselves as a baby. We have been absolutely amazed by their enthusiasm to share their memories and reflections about this time of their lives. We wanted to honour and value their memories and asked the children’s consent to record them in a book format so we could revisit them and share with our friends.
We now have a problem. The children have begun to express a desire to share their story, which is written in our book, with their family. We are sharing this provocation with the children and can’t wait to see their social, communication and problem solving skills in action. Watch this space!
Leanne Williams and Nell Tierney
News from the Ferguson Room
The children have enjoyed returning to their room after the holiday period. They have embraced the learning opportunities with confidence and enthusiasm, and we have all appreciated the divine autumn weather. We welcome our student teacher, Miss Yee, who is doing a project on sustainability with the children.
Our PYP Unit of Inquiry this term, ‘Identity can be shaped over time’, enables us to continue with our research into who we are as individuals and as a community of learners. Almost all of the children have now made a portrait of their object of importance and these can be seen displayed in our room. The portraits have been created with the help of Caterina Pennestri who has worked closely with the children to teach them the skills to make the representations. We have now begun work with our talented Dance teacher Eva Simitsis to explore the emotions behind this relationship with the object/place/person/animal. When Miss Simitsis asked the question, ‘Can you tell a story through dance?’, the children replied with an emphatic ‘NO!’. However, within the half-hour lesson they learned that they could communicate many different emotions through dance and thus their understanding of the possibilities of this wonderful medium for expression has begun to develop.
‘Empathy can be developed through listening to the stories of others’. Do you think this is true? This is a theory we have developed through our work with the children this year. When we share things about ourselves we are sharing our stories, and we invite others to gain an understanding of who we are. The children have begun to bring in their favourite story books from home. This is a way of finding out more about each other and at the same time, it brings a focus to the elements of storytelling in preparation for creating a little autobiography that will allow the children to reflect on how they have grown and changed over time.
We would like to invite you to read a story to the children at some time during this term. This may be one your child loves or perhaps one that you loved as a child yourself. Your participation in our learning adds such rich depth to our knowledge of one another and brings an added element of joy to our daily life in the classroom. Please let us know if you are available. We can accommodate you at any time! Thank you so much. We are looking forward to many occasions to work together with you as partners in your child’s education. We hope to see many of you at our Mother’s Day Afternoon Tea this Friday.
Mel Angel
News from the Hallett Room
Welcome back to Term 2 in the Hallett Room and a warm welcome to our new families. We are excited for another wonderful term with your children. As our planning continues from last term, we have seen the inquiry into identity being shaped over time come to life already. The children continued to share their self-portrait bags during Vacation Care and we have used their continued interest to plan for our next step. As we revisited the bags, one of the friends wondered if we would recognise each other from our baby photographs.
“No one will know this is me!!” they exclaimed, hiding their baby photo behind them. We decided to take out some of the photographs of the children when they were younger and guess who was who. This had a strong impact on the children as they started to distinguish who each photograph was of.
“This must be Gabriella as she has blue eyes.”
“No it could also be Taylor.”
“Eye colour stays the same.”
“But your hair gets longer.”
“But it can be cut.”
“All babies have short hair.”
As we begin to delve into our inquiry, these ideas and theories are what we want to investigate. We built on some of this thinking by drawing what we looked like at different stages of our life. We would love the children to investigate photos of themselves and each other as babies. If you have a couple of photographs of your child as a baby and toddler, we would love to have a copy (we can photocopy them and return) for us to look at the change of our appearance over time.
Our aim for the term is to understand our identity in a more holistic way. We want to move from the appearance of a person to exploring someone’s character.
Pam Reid