The school age children at RisingOaks | St. Patrick are excited to see what new and exiting learning we are going to do this year. We spent our first week getting to know the new additions to our school age team and we were excited to meet with the children and teachers  that are new and that we knew from the summer and last year,

We played get to know you games like switch and four square which allowed the children to be themselves without teacher direction and get to know each other more authentically, we also enjoyed eating the snacks that our cook Shay has made made for us, a lot of the children commented on how much they loved the snacks.

We decided to have a carpet meeting about the rules of the classroom and we talked about different activity ideas and project ideas we could do. 

The children enjoyed playing with blocks and Lego and with plastic and stuffed toy animals. We thought about doing a project on animals or buildings and we are going to decide this month what to focus on. We may even focus on both topics!

The children’s interest in blocks took us to adding new types of blocks to build with and they were busy building different types of structures and testing out if our elaborate designs work and stay standing. We extended our animal interest by setting up plastic animals on turf and also setting up an arctic animal sensory bin where the children had to make sea ice for the animals to walk on. The children enjoyed acting out scenarios with the animals and pretending they were characters. 

We can continue to expand on the children’s interest using the learning domains.