Greetings!

In this our final week of focusing on the theme of Spring students were particularly expressive! Our classroom has many important points of focus such as English language aquistion and usage as well as play, nonetheless, as a Kindergarten our first and foremost important task is to encouage students to be creative, expressive and independent thinkers. Drawing heavily from Reggio Emilia pedagogy which asks learners to express what they see, feel and think through art this week we accomplished a lot of visual art projects tying them directly back to our unit theme and associated vocabulary.At this stage most pupils are very comfortable in gerneralising their English language abilities to do this.

In our Kindergarten and Pre-K cohorts students completed two notable pieces of visual artwork. In drawing and creating a rainbow students were deliberately given only the primary colours and knew that if they wanted to create variations such as pink, green, purple they would need to know the necessary combinations.  We reviewed and talked about this as a collective during circle time After students had a decent idea what they would need to do in order to acheive certain colours my role as an teacher was to allow them to be as individual and creative as they wanted. The results of the rainbows were quite diverse! Our pre-k group also took part in this activity, however, placing the need to blend primary colours to create secondary, students were given a varied water colour template to work with; unlike the older students the focus here was on meaningful usage and recall of the taught colours.

Another intresting bit of art work created later in the week were our ear-bud cherry blossom (and other vocabulary) dot paintings! Miss. Samantha has been fortunate enough to live in Japan where the blossoming of gorgeous cherry blossoms unmistakably mark the change in seasons and did her teacher training in Australia where dot painting in primary schools is often done as a means of honour aboriginal people. Many Russian students would not experienced this form of painting before and it did meet with some strange looks from the kids at first! ...but was enjoyed by all.

This week also marked the birthday celebrations of a famous Tatar writer Abdullah Tukai. An important day to celebrate their heritage children created pictures and listened to stories in their Russian and Tatar oriented classes. As a collective (all staff) we visited a local playground that featured characters and imortant figures in Tukai`s writing--this was enjoyed by all.

Finally this week we welcomed a new student our Pre-K class! Amir it`s wonderful to have you join us!