A unique Primary School, offering a British based, child centred education in the Turks and Caicos Islands
As part of our “Building a classroom community”, the Kindergarteners explored a “Measuring Friends” project where they measured their friends using paper dolls.
Afterwards, they transferred their information onto a chart to compare and contrast each other’s heights. The project involved cooperating, negotiating and utilizing critical thinking skills all in the name of fun!
To complement and extend on our exploration of our “Building our classroom/school community” topic, the Kindergarteners wanted to develop the outside “village” space by adding more sand toys and kitchen cooking items. We decided to have a bake sale to raise money to buy these items. Year one also participated in the sale.
The bake sale was a great success with lots of smiley customers enjoying our delights. All the children helped to count up the money and altogether we raised $230. We look forward now to buying some new items and getting to play with them.
What a wonderful example of how academic learning can be meaningful and fun!
Each Dress Down Day a class will have the opportunity to hold an activity for the whole school to enjoy. This may be a fundraising initiative for a project in their class or simply a time to share or celebrate something special.
This month the kindergarteners are having a bake sale as part of their emergent curriculum topic “School is Cool: Building a community in our classroom and at Provo Primary”. The class has been working together to improve the outside house area (they have named it ‘The village’). They have decided that they need more outdoor materials for this play space. They made a shopping list and presented it to Ms Alison and Miss Sian. It includes cups, plates, pots, food, a tea party set with a teapot, a table for the kitchen and shovel and buckets to make sand castles.
They have planned the bake sale to raise money for these extra toys that they believe are important for the village play area. I am sure donations of these toy items will also be gratefully received. The Year 1 class has also joined in with the bake sale as they share the play areas with the Kindergarten class.
So when you come to pick up your child today, come ready for your senses to be enchanted by the wonderful array of baked goodies to tempt you and know that as you enjoy these, the Kindergarteners and Year 1s will be most thankful for your support.
This term’s focus on Letterland has really allowed the children in the Kindergarten class a chance to interact with the Letterland characters, consolidating initial sound knowledge and learning all the fun Letterland stories which help to explain why letters make certain sounds when standing together in a word.
Did you know for example, that when Sammy Snake stands next to Harry Hat Man in a word, Harry turns around to Sammy and tell him to SH…. He hates noise and Sammy makes so much noise hissing around all over Letterland. When Clever Cat stands next to Harry, his hairy hat tickles her nose and instead of saying her usual “C” sound, she sneezes, making a little “Ch” sound.
Please enjoy looking at the pictures of the Kindergarten children having fun with Letterland!
Spring was certainly in the air this morning with our spectacular EYFS Spring Bonnet Parade. What a wonderful variety of bonnets, with flowers, chicks, eggs and bunnies galore! All the older children and parents enjoyed seeing all the hat designs, each one showing such amazing creativity. What a lovely way to celebrate the end of our spring term!
Friday morning saw the launch of our first Science Fair. Throughout our Early Years’ classes, a multitude of hands-on learning activities were being explored. It was lovely to see parents, visitors and children together observing, problem solving, predicting, thinking, making decisions and most importantly talking about what they were doing. A big thank you to all our teachers for their hard work and to all the parents and visitors who came to enjoy and share the science learning with the children. If sadly you weren’t able to make it, we hope you gain a feel for our Science Fair through the short movie above.
Kindergarten took an exciting field trip to Provo Ponies! We learned all about the care and grooming practices of looking after ponies. The children got to get up close and personal with the ponies as they brushed, fed and cleaned the hooves of several different ponies. After learning how to care for the ponies, the children got to sit on Turtle, the biggest horse in the world!
I think we were all amazed by how gentle and beautiful the horses were. Many of the children had never seen a real pony before so it was quite the experience for us all!
I would like to thank Camille and the kind workers at Provo Ponies for allowing my class the opportunity to see their beautiful ponies!
This term, Kindergarten has been exploring different animal habitats around the world. After learning all about the weather, the plants and the animals in the rainforest we were excited to visit a garden rainforest right here in Provo!
Mark and Barbara Pankhurst kindly let us explore their rainforest grotto; we got to see a waterfall, a turtle pond and lots of vegetation that looked like they might belong in a real rainforest. When we saw some fruit trees, we could imagine monkey’s jumping tree to tree to nab the precious fruit!
Read on to see more amazing photos of our trip.
Our Kindergarten children have been working really hard these last six weeks learning their letters and sounds. Now, they’ve moved on to sounding out simple words with word families, such as “at”, “og” and “an”.
Kindergarten was invited to the Year 1’s class to listen to some lovely reading and they enjoyed it a lot. The children in Year 1 are becoming confident readers! Every two weeks, we plan on getting together to listen to each other read. Both Year 1 and Kindergarten children are really excited to add this new element of ‘Reading Buddies’ to their Literacy programme.
All the Early Years children and teachers were so excited to get new outdoor shelves and bins to keep all our lovely toys organized that we could hardly wait to put them all together! Both Kindergarten and Junior Kindergarten worked together to build the shelves and containers, all of which were bought by PTA funding. Please take a look at the pictures to see how we all got on. It was tough work but phew, it looks lovely out in our playground now! A massive thank you to the PTA.
Kindergarten’s beginning topic is Habitats around the World. Within this topic, we will be identifying and making a connection between different animals and their habitats. First, we’ve been learning about the polar habitat. So far, we’ve been learning all about polar bears that live in the Arctic and next we’ll learn about penguins in the Antarctic. We’ve learned how polar bear keep warm in the icy cold weather, what food they eat and how the mother polar bear creates a den to have her babies in.
For our weekly craft activity, we made polar bears! Have a look at some of the Kindergarten children having fun making their textured polar bears. Aren’t they cool?
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This term, my Kindergarten children have really blossomed into confident beginning readers! They have worked really hard throughout year with learning their sounds, blends and sight words.
Each day after lunch, the children pair up together to explore and read their “just right” classroom levelled reading books. First, they read them to themselves and then they read them to their partner. Each day a child also gets chosen to read their book out-loud to the whole class. I’m so proud of their amazing progress and their increase in confidence when sounding out unfamiliar words. What an amazing Kindergarten class!
To celebrate theme week, Preschool and Kindergarten got together to share their learning. Preschool got to explore Kindergarten’s dinosaur museum, the dinosaur dig fossil sorting centre and play in our dinosaur small world. It was a lot of fun for Kindergarten and Preschool to pair off and for the Kindergarten children to lead the little ones around ‘Dino Land’. The next day the Preschool children invited the Kindergarten to their room.
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This week, Kindergarten has investigated how fruits, vegetables and flowers grow. We have read lots of different storybooks and non-fiction books about growing and changing. We visited the garden of one of the children in the class for an outdoor play and a picnic. We also got to plant 3 different kinds of seeds and starter plants—bok choy, black beans and pumpkin. We also got to smell and taste mint and basil. Thank you to the family for letting us visit their lovely garden!
This half term, Kindergarten has enjoyed learning all about dinosaurs. We’ve learnt about how dinosaurs grew from eggs, facts about lots of different dinosaurs (Did you know that dinosaurs that walk on four legs are plant eaters?). We painted a Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs mural. In our role play area we created a dinosaur museum and acted as tour guides for the visiting Year 2 class. As our culminating task, we made junk model dinosaurs! It was so interesting to see how creative all the children were in picking out their materials for the different body parts, cutting, gluing and taping independently, and then finally, painting their dinosaurs! Please check out the pictures to see how much fun we had learning about dinosaurs and making our 3D dinosaurs. [Read more…]
This term, Kindergarten is lucky to be able to use the soccer field, the Sports Centre arena floor, and the upstairs gymnastics equipment room in the Sports Centre for our P.E. lessons.
This week, we had our first gymnastics lesson together with myself and Miss Shara and it was a lot of fun! Gymnastics helps to build physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination and balance. The children explored different ways of travelling (such as bunny hops and crab crawls).
As pa
rt of our learning about Toys this term, the Kindergarteners read the book Things I Like by Anthony Browne. In the book, the main character shows himself doing all sorts of his favourite things like playing with toys, making a cake, having a bath and even painting! So, we decided that we would make something we liked. After voting, we decided to make crowns.
This week, Kindergarten held its first open house of the school year! It was a great success and an absolute pleasure to see the children so enthusiastic, proud and independent while showing off their learning and their classroom to their parents.
Some of the highlights included showing off our turtle table, exploring the home corner, playing numeracy games on our interactive white board, sounding out our pocket chart rhyming words, explaining who’s who in our Letterland characters and looking at the Transport and Travel board displays.
I would like to thank all the parents who were able to come. It was lovely to see the big smiles and the pride and happiness from both children and parents. I look forward to our next one! Read on to see more photos.
Download a copy of our November Newsletter and find out more about what’s going on in our Kindergarten class this upcoming month.
Kindergarten really enjoyed their Maths work today on patterns – they got to eat them! Using healthy fruits that had been donated to the class for ‘Keeping Healthy Week’, they created patterns by carefully sliding on pieces of watermelon and pineapple onto a kebab stick. Yum, Yum!
As part of the Literacy programme this year, our class has been combining the best parts of the phonics schemes, Letterland and Jolly Phonics. This allows the children to learn all the sounds and letters in a multi-sensory way. In class, we learn about sounds and letters using the Letterland characters and stories, and then we combine them with the Jolly Phonics actions. The children are coming along really well and I am really proud of their efforts! See our Kindergarten Letters and Sounds Newsletter for further information on how you can support and help your child at home with these early reading and writing skills.
Last week, Kindergarten got their drama shoes on when they acted out our story of the week– Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw. The story is about a bunch of silly sheep that cram together in a jeep and take an ill-fated road trip. Take a look at our acting chops!
Kindergarten rules! As an end of the year celebration, the Kindergarten children took part in a special graduation ceremony in front of their family and friends. The children were all dressed up in their best uniform with a special graduation cap, which had their dream job on it. The kids sang You’ve Got a Friend in Me, What a Wonderful World and Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which brought tears and cheers from their families. To end a wonderful and successful year together, the children were presented with a Kindergarten diploma, which they were super excited to get.
Miss Tracy and Mrs. Myrna have had an absolutely fantastic year with all the children and feel previledged to have been their teachers!
Traditionally, we end our Spring Term with a bonnet parade and PTA Egg Hunt. The younger children in the school amazed us all with their egg-stremely creative Spring Bonnets. What a lot of work must have gone into some of these. I’m sure the children enjoyed making them and showing them to everyone! Both young and old across the school, enjoyed hunting for eggs in our traditional Egg Hunt and we thank the PTA for organising this much-loved event.
To celebrate the end of their dinosaur topic our Kindergarten children took the short boat ride to Little Water Cay in search of rock iguanas. Although not actually dinosaurs, these lizards, which are endemic to our islands, do conjure up images of prehistoric life when you see them close up.
The Turks and Caicos Rock Iguana is a protected species. They are primarily herbivores and feed on berries, leaves and fruit, occasionally supplementing this diet with insects. They live and sleep in shallow burrows they dig in loose sand or under rocks. In the morning they emerge from their burrows and bask in the sun before going off to feed. At midday, when the sun is the hottest, they retreat into the shade to avoid overheating.
On Little Water Cay the National Trust has built a boardwalk pathway. Accompanied by a guide, the children followed the trail, saw the iguanas at close range and learned all about them and why they are so special to our islands.
Thank you to everyone who helped make this exciting and interesting trip possible. Click on to see some photos of their adventure.