Early Childhood Development Initiative

Ba Futuru Preschool, Term 2

Quarterly Report - April to June 2023                          

This term we have 43 children enrolled. We had 5 new enrolments this term. 7 children are full time. 9 are from the Seroja Community. 27 are fee-paying children. We have 18 boys and 25 girls.

Term 2 Focus - Exploring Community Support Services and Occupations and revisiting Unity - Working as a Team.

This term our teaching and learning plan focus has been exploring our local community occupations and services. We have had a trip to the airport, learning about an engine of a plane and a pilot’s work. Our children have learnt new vocabularies, and have asked and answered questions and gained knowledge about how their world operates around them. At preschool, we have read stories, sung songs, done art and crafts, and role-played different occupations to learn more.

We facilitate daily the importance of working together as a team through sharing a common goal. Teacher’s role model this and at tidy up times everyone gets involved to tidy and clean. Our children show responsibility and a sense of pride through working together to tidy their environment. Our older children are good role models to our younger children through helping their younger peers, through being friendly and supporting them when they are in need. Our children have a deep sense of identity, belonging and wellbeing through being able to enjoy their place of play and learning through developing confidence and competence in being responsible for self, others and the environment.

Maths and Science

Many different mathematical activities and processes are happening daily in our programme. Building a tower of blocks to exploring with water, sand and other sensory materials. Our younger children are learning the fundamental elementary mathematic language and concepts. Some concepts our children are learning are full, empty, high, low, same, more, less, one more, not enough, how many, plenty, fewer, take away and add on. Our children compare objects and learn that a value can be attached to objects.

This term we continue to focus on numeracy, patterns, measuring, sorting, counting, grouping, shapes, addition, and subtraction. We encourage our children to think mathematically, through estimating, connecting, problem solving, and playing with 3 dimensional objects.

We explore science activities regularly and like to start early each year introducing these for our children’s curiosity and desire to explore and experiment. This ultimately strengthens our children problem-solving and analytical skills. It gets our children to question how things work and develop an understanding of their environment. This term our children showed a strong interest in learning about Volcano eruptions, and enjoyed making the chemical reaction. We also experimented with fiction doing the non-leak plastic bag experiment. The Rainbow magic milk experiment has also been popular. We also have reintroduced this term slime to our sensorial activities, our diverse learners really enjoy this medium to work with.

Physical Movement Programme (PMP)

Skate board

We have continued with this activity “skateboarding” introduced last year. We have been practicing every Wednesday and Friday there has been a huge improvement of skill and balance. Our older children have become confident to get on, balance and skate along and learn how to turn around, and skate independently.

Physical Movement Programme

Pedro has been leading our PMP every Monday. Children have been practicing gross motor skills, coordination, concentration, eye tracking skills, team work, and balancing through participation. We have been playing, musical chair, mat races, running race, balloon race, parachute, breathing exercises, Circus dance, Yoga and challenge courses.

Place Based Education (P.B.E) Exploring our Community.

Mission Aviation Fellowship (M.A.F) Airport Excursion 15/06/2023. 40 children visited in groups of 10 children. During the visit the children were all naturally curious to find out about the Pilot Job, and how the airplane worked. The pilot introduced the mechanics and answered our children’s questions.

We believe connecting classroom to the community and to learn by being involved, gives children a strong sense of belonging and identity through community and their place in it. Place-based Learning is a framework that effectively delivers experiential learning and supports teachers in amplifying learning from place and context.

Transition to School Programme (5 and 6 year olds)

Our teaching team have been delivering the Jolly Phonics Literacy Programme for over 7 years, and are very experienced. We deliver the programme systematically going through the alphabet sounds, actions, reading and writing, carrying on from last term. We have been playing many literacy games including memorising the English Rainbow Sight words and we have devised a Tetun Sight Word list. We are very proud of 5 and 6 year olds, who are eager to learn and have a solid foundation of letter sounds and are able to blend the sounds to read words. Many of our 5 and 6 year olds are reading our early reader books and are creating simple stories to write with a teacher’s support.

We are using our Montessori Maths materials and learning about numbers and place value.

Parent/Teacher Conferences

This term our parents’ conference took place from 19 - 27 June 2023. 41 parents participated in the conferences.

Parent’s Survey

28 parents participated in the survey. We had positive feedback about our preschool service. Parents were over all happy with their child’s learning and progress. Many parents thanked all the teachers for their good work during the semester, they could see the good results in their children’s development.

Quotation from Parent

Parent from the community (Child is in the Sprout Class-2-4 years)

“First of all, I would like to thank to all the Ba Futuru teacher for your amazing work.

Since my child enrolled in Ba Futuru, my child has shown a lot of improvement. His English language vocabulary has improved, He is confident to practice speaking with his brother and sister at home after coming back from preschool and during the weekend. We, as parents are really happy to see our child developing. He said at school we learn to use a nice voice and respect each other. We as parents will collaborate with the teacher to help him learn better. Again, Thank you very much.”