Hello Everyone
The aquarium visit was lots of fun. The rain held off at the right times, the dugongs were beautiful, the sharks and fish all interesting and a rainbow shone for the journey home!! Each dugong eats 90kg of lettuce every day! It’s a full-time job catering for dugong meals as all the lettuce has to be washed and threaded onto special frames and then lowered into the tank. Thanks to all the parents who came with us and made the excursion such a happy learning experience. We appreciated your help.
This week we have continued the exploration of marine life. Yesterday we added photos of the creatures we saw at the aquarium to the mural. There is also a poster of photos of us all enjoying the excursion. In Craft today we are planning on making a life-size shark.
There is also an interest in cars and we have some car books and have started a project on cars. If anyone has an interesting/sports car we’d love to have a look at it!
Last Wednesday Chris, Gabriela and I went to a talk on bilingualism, simultaneous and successive language learning. It was really interesting and informative. What is most important in families where one family member speaks another language is that they consistently speak that language to the children of the family. Another thing we learnt is to value the incredible resource that a person who speaks another language brings to an environment. In light of this, Gabriela has started speaking a lot more Spanish in the daily routines. We also have some bilingual children’s books from the library. If anyone has any linguistic resources or experience to share we would love you to come and share it with us and the children.
School Meeting is now at 9.30am on a Friday morning to give a longer period of unbroken time on Fridays. The primary school has reinvigorated the Friday program to enable children to have more choice in personal projects and more extended time to devote to these projects.
Today is Willem and Luuk’s last day. We hope they have lots more fantastic experiences in their last month of Australia, and find wonderful schools to work in when they get back to Holland.
Lastly a reminder to parents to please sign the sign-on sheet each morning when dropping children at preschool.
Thanks to Kasia and Stan for the beach materials and Rebecca and Oscar for the dress-up items.
Love from
Sue, Chris and Gabriela.
