October passed rather quickly with our week-long festival celebrating the National Day.  We hope that all our children and families enjoyed a lovely holiday!

Before the holiday began, our children learned about the significance of the National Day festival in Chinese culture, dressed up in traditional Chinese clothing, and created artwork to show their patriotism and love towards the motherland.  All the children thoroughly enjoyed the festivities held in the kindergarten and it provided our children an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of history and an understanding of their place in the world.

During October, our children have spent more time in the kindergarten, adapting more to school life, their teachers, and classmates.  This is especially true for all our newcomers to Huamei Kindergarten, both students and teachers!

This month was the beginning of the interest groups.  Interest groups are special activities held weekly for the children, to stimulate their interest in various areas outside of the regular classroom lesson content.  Interest group topics include art, drama, and sport this semester, all of which have been well received and popular among the children.

It’s been a big month for the continuation of our IB inquiry lessons.  For the connection level, the children continued to reinforce their knowledge of Guangzhou landmarks, such as Canton Tower, Liede Bridge, Yuexiu Park, Baiyun Mountain.  The children also learned about local Cantonese food – dim sum, and explored the differences between Guangzhou in the south, and Beijing in the north.  It was wonderful to see how strongly our parents are supporting the learning progress of the children with all the beautiful photos of them having dim sum at restaurants on weekends!

Our senior level children discovered more about multiculturalism. Areas learned about include food, inventions, festivals, and clothing from China compared to the countries, from which our international teaching team originate. For food, the children could learn about new unfamiliar food from western countries, such as fish and chips, New Zealand lamb, and even have an opportunity to try marmite!  The children have the chance to learn more about local culture, while also learning about how big the world is and gaining more knowledge at such a young age.

The medium level students are focused on learning about stories and interpreting them in different ways.  The storybook Three Billy Goats has been the central story explored with the children learning about the characters, key words and sentences and even role-playing sections from the story.  Role-play is an excellent method to allow children the opportunity to express themselves, show understanding of the story, practice the language, and build emotions through language.

The little junior children have learned how to express their feelings and ideas through play for our first unit of inquiry.  Fun activities they have completed include decorating photo frames, making animal masks, and putting animals in a barn.  The activities have been well received by the children and they receive the chance to learn about materials, shapes, colours in fun and engaging ways.

As October comes an end, we look forward to our Special ME decoration activity and the opening ceremony of our sports meet.  Wish you a nice start to November as the weather begins to cool down in Guangzhou.

□ Author | Felix Lam