YMCA Student Care Centre @ Kuo Chuan Newsletter January – June 2016
Introduction Dear Parents Warmest greetings from the staff at KCSCC! It has been a pleasure having worked alongside you in the past six months. We are delighted to journey with you to nurture the children. We hope that this bi-annual newsletter will help to forge a close relationship with you. In this first issue, we will be sharing with you the various events that have taken place and those that are to come. These include the enrichment classes, Character and Citizenship Education lessons, and the exciting school holiday programmes which we hope our children have enjoyed.
Enrichment Classes Each term has its own uniquely themed enrichment classes. So far, we have conducted ‘Fun with Crayons’ and ‘Choral Beats’ for Term 1 and 2 respectively.
June 2016 Volume 1, Issue 1
For Cultivating Creativity in “Fun with Crayons”, we invited two in-house instructors to teach our children to The skill of blending and the use of colours were create art pieces using various shapes, monochromatic introduced. “Fun with Crayons” aims to lines and colours with crayons. inspire our children to display their creativity with the techniques learnt. The instructors also encouraged the children to explore the impossibilities and think out of the box.
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Character and Citizenship Education
Stephanie Song trying out a new skill learnt.
Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) has always been at the heart of Singapore’s education, which aims to inculcate values and build social and emotional competencies in every child. CCE lessons are held twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Since January, the children at the centre have learnt and explored Character traits of the month such as Orderliness, Respect, Gratefulness, Resilience and Obedience.
see them apply their learning in their daily lives.
(Above) The girls writing the words “Team work” using markers held together by strings. This was a task that required perseverance and team work to complete. Well done!!!
BUILDING CHARACTER from PLAY Trevann Teo, David Lim and Stephanie Song beamed happily when their art pieces were chosen.
All completed art pieces were displayed on the wall at the centre. This gives children a sense of pride and ownership of their own creations.
Above are some examples of the children’s creations.
In April Resilience was the Character of the Month. The teachers introduced many games and activities to place the children in situations which called for resilience and perseverance. This was done intentionally in the hope that children would be able to better learn through play, and understand that resilience is the vital character that helps them to be strong emotionally and mentally. It was encouraging and heart-warming to see the children attempting to push on and not give up despite difficulties and obstacles in their games. The teachers at the student care centre value character development and focus on developing and instilling good values in the children. We hope to shape the children with good character traits and we wish to
(Above) Children building a tower using spaghetti. YES!!! Spaghetti!!! Perseverance and team work are required. Keep going, children!!!
(Above) The boys hold onto the string so as to let the ball roll all the way down. No sweat as long as we show perseverance and work as a team. -2-
Fun
March Holidays
Fun
Fun
In the short one week holidays, our children had fun experimenting with Science first-hand!
The Pink School Bus was brought in to turn our children into little detective Sherlock Homles.
School out SCIENCE IN The teachers came up with science experiments, hoping to excite and engage the children.
Crime – buster in the making.
Cornflour + water = ??? SLIME!!!
June School Holidays Children make a WHAT??? A VOLCANO!!!
Hmmm…Who is it???
During the June school holidays, various holiday programmes were planned for the students by the teachers. These activities aimed to give the students a break from school work. One of the activities was to get the children to be detectives to solve a mystery.
Is it…..
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Learning is yummy~ because I get to EAT them all.
Up & Coming…. 1. Robotic class 2. Y-Entrepreneur 3. Visit to the largest indoor waterplay 4. Ice-cream making class 5. Second bonding session
The children also looked forward to the weekly Friday movie days with various movies like ‘Wreck-It-Ralph’, ‘Big Hero 6’ and ‘The Good Dinosaur’.
FEEDBACK In order to promote close family ties, we were more than glad to have the children to invite their daddy or mummy to join them on one of the Friday movie days.
Through play, monetary sense, dollars and cents are learnt. Monopoly money was used for this activity.
We look forward to your feedback. YMCA SCC @ Kuo Chuan Tel : 6254 0680 Email : kcscc@ymca.edu.sg
After the movie, the parents were invited to chat with the various teachers to know more about how their children were doing. This is definitely an afternoon which was well received by parents. Thank you mummy and daddy for your support in making this day possible We sincerely hope that the children enjoyed these school holiday programmes which were specially arranged just for them.
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