ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILLS Term 6 2019

NURSERY 1 (born in 2016)

Fine motor skills are involved in everyday activities such as writing, lacing, buttoning and feeding oneself. Therefore, having good control and dexterity of muscle movements, especially in the wrists and hands, would enable young children to be more efficient, confident and independent individuals at carrying out such tasks.

In this lesson, your child will be engaged in dual-purposed art & craft activities. Additionally, several paper manipulation techniques (tearing, scrunching, folding and rolling) will be introduced. These activities seek to train fine motor skills, bilateral coordination and hand-eye coordination while reinforcing previously covered Term 6 concepts (spatial recognition, shapes, prepositions and verbs). This is also where your child would learn how to access the different situations to apply the appropriate techniques.

Lastly, your child will be taught how to safely and ergonomically handle a pair of scissors (grasp-release motion, applying pressure) to create their very own works of art. During this process, your child will also be challenged to complete these tasks without distraction – particularly since we are dealing with a sharp tool.

NURSERY 2 (born in 2015)

As your child transits from Nursery to Kindergarten, the curriculum would experience a greater shift in focus towards writing skills development. In preparation for this change, we seek to train your child’s fine motor skills – particularly in the control and dexterity of hands and wrists.

To welcome the year-end festivities, your child will be involved in the creation of decorative Christmas tree ornaments. Through this process, they will revisit lacing and knot-tying techniques while practice their pincer grasp and scissors-handling skills. Additionally, we encourage your child to colour within line boundaries, as a method of instilling discipline while restricting pencil movements to confined spaces, as a precursor to conventional writing expectations.

Subsequently, the concept of symmetry will be introduced. Your child will be challenged to distinguish bilaterally symmetrical from asymmetrical images. By getting children to fold and cut images length-wise through the centre, your child observes the two halves of an image physically separating. Through this practical experience, we hope to guide your child towards determining bilateral symmetry in given images, by mentally visualising an imaginary dividing line cutting across the center.

KINDERGARTEN 1 (born in 2014)

Children acquire life skills through personal experiences to accomplish everyday activities in purposeful ways. When equipped, children gain greater confidence and independence to tackle daily challenges.

In this lesson, children learn to handle a knife safely and efficiently to cut fruits. Involvement with the food preparation is a sensory experience that encourages inquisitiveness – to try out new foods, discover the diversity of food types as well as the components of each dish. Here, children become familiarized with the geometric concept of cross sections – to identify fruits and vegetables solely based on the cross-sectional images, before applying this concept to 3-D shapes (i.e. cone, cylinder) as a buildup from lesson 4 (About Geometry). An awareness and understanding of the cross section concept provides your child an additional tool for visualizing and understanding 3-D objects/structures at a deeper level.

Finally, procedural understanding and structured writing will be reinforced through following a recipe (non-fictional text type). Children combine ingredients step-wise as per instructions to prepare a salad dish, enticing your child to discover the fun in reading, while enhancing comprehension.

KINDERGARTEN 2 (born in 2013)

This lesson focuses on introducing the concept of money.

Your child will learn to distinguish between different coins (5¢, 10¢, 20¢, 50¢, $1) and notes ($2, $5, $10, $50); recognising the specific monetary values that each specific coin/note commands.

Additionally, your child will practice how to write prices in dollars (i.e. $2) and cents (i.e. 80¢), discovering how 80¢ can also be represented as $0.80. Here, children will gain their first exposure to unit conversion (dollars-cents), and be challenged to apply this knowledge to the addition and subtraction of money. Fundamentally, we want your child to understand that $1 and 20¢ can also be written as $1.20.

Through the addition of money, your child will begin to appreciate how a single monetary value can both be represented by a single coin / note as well as a combination of the two (reinforcing the idea of one-to-many correspondence).
Through the subtraction of money (infused within financial transaction simulations), your child will continue to grow in familiarity to the concepts of payment and change.

For children to excel in this aspect, they will need to have a strong foundation in skip-counting (i.e. counting in multiples of fives and tens).
The introduction of how prices are written ultimately helps children better understand other closely related mathematical concepts such as fractions and decimals.

Next LESSON'S focus:
comprehensive review