Ouyen dreaming

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Louise under Creativity & Imagination, Early Learning, learning about our community

We are very interested in learning more about Aboriginal culture at kinder, so we really enjoyed a visit fom Jo and Tony today.

Tony played the didgeridoo and Jo played the clapping sticks.

Jo told us about the dreaming – it’s the story that Aboriginal people tell about what they do, what they hunt, where they live, and so on.

Jo showed us how they got the idea for some of the symbols we know – the person sitting down symbol comes from the marks in the dirt when someone has been sitting down.

This dreaming is about people sitting around the fire hole near a big rock and they found an emu egg – they put it in their dillybag.

We made a mural of our dreaming at Ouyen kinder.

The children each chose some symbols that they could make up a story about – sitting down by a waterhole with their dad, or going hunting with a boomerang for emu.

This dreaming was about sitting around a water hole with an emu egg and the dilly bag and a digging stick to find some bush potatoes – we followed the emu tracks to find the egg.

And we pretended to be emus pecking on the ground then stretching out our necks to look around.

We think that our Ouyen Dreaming is pretty special!

looking for emu eggs

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Louise under learning about our community, The Natural Environment

We had a visit from Aunty Colleen, an elder from the Barkandji tribe, to tell us about how she goes hunting for emu eggs.

She brought her own little gulti to show us how you can tell if it’s a boy or a girl emu (boys have a blue patch on their neck).

She showed us a photo of emu tracks and we could see the print of their 3 toes very clearly.

We found out that an emu egg is about the same size as 14 hens’ eggs.

We learnt a lot of other things too – I think we will be talking about emus for a while! (Did you know that the dads hatch the chicks and stay with them for 2 years – what devoted dads!)

Thanks very much Auntie Colleen!

Printing Aboriginal symbols

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Louise under Language & Literacy, learning about our community

It’s National Aboriginal and Islander Children’s Day on Wednesday of this week, so another good chance to focus on the culture and experiences of our First people.

We have some wonderful little books that show some of the symbols that are used by Aboriginal people in their art and storytelling, so we offered the children a chance to use them in their art work. We laminated some reference sheets to use in case things got a bit messy!

We thought we might try to do some printing. We used the backs of baking pans and muffin tins, rolled paint thickly over them and then drew the symbols with cotton buds.