Inspired by food! Great learning!

Upper Pre-Primary have been super busy since our last blog. On returning from the midterm break the children got stuck into learning about Autumn. They made beautiful Autumn pictures by painting and printing leaves. They were also inspired by our hedgehog poem and made lovely hedgehog paintings by painting with their fingers! To further celebrate the season of Autumn we went on a lovely nature walk in a park in Ghent with our buddy class (upper primary). Each child was paired with their special buddy, as they collected things from nature-horse chestnuts, pine cones, leaves, sticks etc. The children were delighted to find mushrooms as we had been learning about mushrooms and printing with mushrooms at school! As a special treat and in connection to our unit on food we went to a ‘frituur’ and each child shared a packet of Belgian fries with their buddy! We are looking forward to doing more things together!

The children thoroughly enjoyed all the learning and activities connected to our food unit. We began with our entry point which was lunch in the Appelier vegetarian restaurant in Ghent. The children could visit the kitchen and choose what they wanted to eat. They were excited and eager to try new things. All the children were very well behaved and used good manners!    

Then back at school we created our own restaurant. The children arranged and cleaned everything to make our ‘class café’ super nice! They even washed the windows! Over the past few weeks the children have had lots of fun playing in our class café, setting the tables, cooking, using menus, taking orders and paying with pretend money! There has been lots of learning and social and language development during these play moments. The children have also been learning new skills while working with real food-peeling and grating carrots and squeezing oranges have been a great success! The children have been learning about healthy and unhealthy food and have learnt the names of many different fruit and vegetables. We have talked about how fruit and vegetables grow on different parts of the plant - stem, root, bark, flowers and leaves. The children have been introduced to the different food groups – vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. They now check their lunches to see if they have a balanced meal!

The children enjoyed making fruit salad, Irish brown bread and delicious Sushi with Nanami and her Mum.

With all this eating and talking about food we had to learn about the digestive system! The children coloured the different parts of the digestive system on a chart and now have a better understanding of what happens when we eat!

They had lots of fun recreating their own ‘Archimboldo’ pictures using cut out pictures of fruit and vegetables.

The children enjoyed being little scientists when we did the experiment to check the needs of a plant. They discovered a plant needs water, light and heat to grow healthy. Ask your child to explain the results of the experiment to you and what we did!

This week we had our exit point. For this we went to a café close to the school with Christmas decorations that we had made. The decorations will be sold and given to a local charity. The café is super child friendly with a lovely play area for kids. Well worth a visit!

The children have been introduced to our first three personal goals- respect, resilience and co-operation. I am happy to see the children showing good understanding of these words and using them in the classroom.

With the closing of our food unit we have been busy preparing for Christmas, singing songs and making decorations. We had great fun decorating Polish Christmas biscuits with Kasper and his Mum. They were really yummy! And well done to all the children for a super performance in the Christmas concert!

A very happy and peaceful Christmas to everyone! Have a great holiday and see you all in the new year!