I wanted to (belatedly) record the happy day we had at the end of our kinder year.
Yes, Santa did come…
and there were presents (traditionally, the committee gives a book to each child)
but the children stayed remarkably calm and no-one opened the presents that the teachers gave them (we had asked that they save them till they got home or even until Christmas!). Thinking about this in contrast to other years, we didn’t have a different or more “mature” group, really, but we adults were more explicit and encouraging about some guidelines for the children – like each child waiting to open Santaa’s present until everyone had received their gift: this helped the children to share the enjoyment and to stay calmer. (Two children even kept Santa’s gift unopened!)
And yes, we did have our concert in the evening – a concert being about 10 minutes of singing some favourite songs – but with an audience watching which made it most children’s first experience of “performance”.
By this time of the year we usually have most children okay with participating, but if they aren’t keen, there’s no pressure – we want them to enjoy sharing their songs.
All the children were happy to join in this year.
And of course we had the usual toddler joining in as well!
Then came the time to give the children their certificates and their journals and the calendars they had made for their families. 
And the toddler came over for a special hug as well.
And then we all shared a family tea.
It was a nice fairly low-key but still special day. as you can see, we don’t make a big thing of either Christmas (sometimes we may have CALD families who don’t celebrate Christmas) or their “graduation” which is not appropriate to a group where most years we have a child or two return for a second year.
But also the children are still too busy doing kinder stuff till the last minute – when we talked about what they would like to do on their last morning, Ruby asked for the hook-ups – and so we did our usual BrainGym exercises.
It’s interesting that learning how to do some coordinated sequences of movements in BrainGym marked the start of our sessions at the beginning of this year, and choosing to do the same activities, now so easily mastered, helped to finish it.
We look forward to seeing them all come back as “big” school kids in another few months!
If you do have a holiday at this time of the year, we hope you have a safe and relaxing break. See you in February!
Louise
