While we’re all for giving instructions to children when an intentional teaching moment is planned, we still love the way children take that information and interpret it in their own way.

This week the children have been looking at how we are all different. This came about because a lovely boy has just joined the prekinder group. He arrived in Australia recently from Italy and his English is still very limited.

Their teacher has been teaching the children to count and sing in Italian in order to make him feel welcome and an inclusive member of their little community. An added bonus is the children are thriving on learning a new language.

In order to really explore their differences the children were provided with some mirrors, paper, paint and cotton buds and invited them to look at themselves in the mirror to explore their features such as how many eyebrows they have, eye colour, nose, lips, teeth, hair, ears etc.  Their teacher then said to the children, “Once you’ve had a good look at yourself in the mirror, you might like to use the paint and cotton buds to paint your face.”

Their pictures were SO precious!

We love how this child not only chose a paint colour to match his skin tone …

he also made sure to include his ‘bed hair’ spikes in his painting as well.

Our very favourite feel good moment came when this poppet studied her face in the mirror, thought long and hard about what she saw and the colours she wanted to use and …

proceeded to ‘paint her face’!

Her teacher was just about to dive in and throw a piece of paper down in front of her when Donna ‘cut her off at the pass’ reminding her of the way she had worded her instructions to the children …

“Once you’ve had a good look at yourself in the mirror, you might like to use the paint and cotton buds to paint your face.” And THAT is exactly what she did!

Maybe next week we might do away with the paper altogether and get out the real facepaints and just let the children go-to-town!

The Pre Kinder children at Croydon North Preschool are holding a Grandparents’/Special person’s Day in a couple of weeks. To let these special people know it was on, the children had invitations to sign and decorate. We discovered that they needed to use quite a few skills.

It was a great opportunity for us to see how the children were going with writing their names. It also gave a chance to check out their pencil grip.

The next job was to fold the paper – turn it over and press on the folds. Not an easy task for littlies, particularly  as they had to figure out the size that would fit into the envelope!

Then they had to actually put the invitation INTO the envelope. Easy if it was the right size, but a bit of juggling and refolding if it wasn’t – great maths concepts of size, shape and spatial relations coming in here!!

At last it was post the letter time. The children popped them into our kinder post box and they were officially posted by us that afternoon. On the invitation we asked the special people to write back to the children with their reply, so we are hoping that everyone will receive a letter in the post. How exciting!!

If you’ve been following us for a while you’ll know we girls love a great excuse for a ‘Thelma and Louise’ style road trip adventure. This weekend we had the time of our lives as we headed off on a road trip up the east coast of Australia from Melbourne, Victoria to Newcastle in New South Wales to attend the inaugural Inspired EC conference run by the lovely Nicole and Tash.

Day one saw us travel 800 k’s up to Moruya on the beautiful east coast of New South Wales with a further 455 k’s tacked on the next day before arriving at our destination.

We were there to present two workshops at the Conference for which the theme was  ’Unwrapping – Encouraging Risk in the Cotton Wool Generation’. For our workshop we chose to look at emotional risk and part of the way we chose to do this was by not telling our participants what we were going to be doing on the day. Our mission was to see just how many people were prepared to take the risk and dive headfirst into a workshop with us while knowing nothing about what they were in for!

This conference was a wonderful chance to meet up with some of our ECE and blogging friends such as Tash, Nicole and Niki Buchan from Inspired EC and Claire Warden from Mindstretchers in Scotland UK …

as well as our dear friends Jennifer Kable from Let the Children Play and Greg ‘Bear’ Harvey from ‘Males In Early Childhood Education‘ ..

and Marie Armstrong Smith and Wayne Armstrong from Early Years Care … Just to name a few.

It wasn’t until a friend pointed out that not only were our participants taking a risk with us, we too were taking a risk. After all, what if the risk was too great for people who had plenty of other workshop topics with titles to choose from … what if nobody chose to come along to our workshop with no title??

We were thrilled and humbled to hear from Tash that both our workshops had rapidly booked out … WOW! Sixty participants choosing a workshop without a title … Talk about a bunch of risk takers!

When we started off the workshops we asked our participants if they thought they were indeed taking a risk, coming along without knowing what the workshop was going to be about. Some of the people who were unfamiliar with us said YES! Some chose to come only because their work colleague was coming too … safety in number … we get that! Some said they liked the idea of NOT knowing because it was exciting … we get that too! Interestingly the people who were familiar with our Blog, Twitter and Facebook pages said NO they didn’t think they were taking a risk. These people told us they felt like they already knew us, even though we had only ever met a couple of them in person, and by feeling they knew us, they trusted us and by trusting us they felt safe to come along.

Our aim was to have our participants take a risk in joining us and then to step outside their comfort zone for a few hours. Only Gabby Clappison had any basket making experience so we knew our plan had worked. In fact we could tell that by the looks on peoples faces when we told them what they would be doing that they were outside their comfort zone . Fortunately everyone rose to the challenge and had a great time. We sent many participants off proudly carrying the baskets they had made! We had a great time at the Inspired EC conference and are delighted to have been invited back next year when the conference will be even bigger and better.

It was with much excitment that Tash and Nicole announced a few days ago that in 2013 Niki Buchan from Inspired EC …

Marc Armitage from Marc Armitage at Play …

and Tom Hobson, from the Teacher Tom blog …

will be their three keynote speakers! Now this is one conference Australians will NOT want to miss out on. For more details on the conference please email the girls at info@inspiredec.com.