We’ve been reading Aboriginal stories from the Dreaming – and we’ve looked at the symbols that the Aboriginal Australians used in their art. Many of the children did some dot paintings and included these symbols. We also used them to tell a story. These signs are for:

dingo – man, woman, child – fire – snake – kangaroo – hills.

This is the story that we made up and acted out:

The dingo was walking behind the people and the sun started a fire and it burnt the dingo’s tail. There was a snake that saw the people and it slithered away. The kangaroo went behind the people, bouncing around in circles. And then the dingo’s tail got better and he went over the hills.

Learning to use and understand symbols is an important step in the process of learning to think abstractly. This is vital for higher level thinking – we need to be able to think about things separately from our particular context. Using the symbols also helps the children to learn to tell stories – oral language is absolutely fundamental to the ability to read and write later on in their lives. Using the Aboriginal symbols also helps to build respect and understanding of another culture that has flourished in our land for many thousands of years. It’s by both deliberate programming, like this, as well as the little incidental features of our curriculum that we hope to build familiarity and acceptance. (We display the Aboriginal flag in the kinder and Ben said that he had seen that at the football game last weekend on the TV – that’s possibly something he might not have been aware of if we hadn’t displayed and discussed it at kinder.)

We talked about what we should be doing with the “home corner” – it is a very popular area at kinder to begin with every year, but there’s a lot more possibilities for pretend play than just that domestic play, and the children had lost interest in the fire station office quite quickly (not dramatic enough?) So we talked about what other shops we had seen on our walks down the street, and there was a lot of interest in making a hairdresser’s. So that’s what we have done. Some lengths of fabric, hand mirrors, old hair dryers, an office counter, lots of phones, a waiting area (complete with magazines and cups of coffee), the sink to wash your hair – our salon has the lot! The appointments sheet has a space for children to write their names in, the phones support conversation or remembered phone-language, and the chat that goes on while customers are being looked after means that children are having lots of meaningful conversations, often with children who they wouldn’t generally play with. (And the boys have played here a lot as well, though more as customers than as hairdressers.)

We had a wonderful visit from Ruby Homegroup of Years 7 and 8 from the secondary campus, acting out some children’s stories. They left the 3 little pigs’ houses behind for us to use, and the children have had great fun acting out the story. They all know the story really well – acting it out gives them a deep personal understanding of the sequence of events and the feelings of the different characters – though the pigs here don’t look too worried!

Aden, Chloe X and Hollie, and then Evan and Ned helped Adam to hold Bubba the saltwater crocodile up and show their teeth.

The Wild Action Show was fantastic – all the children had so much to say about the animals and they remembered a lot about what had happened and the features that Adam had told them about. The specialness of our native animals leads very nicely into lots of aboriginal stories from the Dreamtime, and with Reconciliation Week we will have time to talk and think about lots of ways to be Australian.