Room News: April 2018

BABIES ROOM

Hello families,

This month in the nursery room we have been looking at the children’s use of their senses to explore and investigate. The children all show great interest in messy play and love to use their hands to feel and experience new textures.
We have offered the children opportunities to play with playdough which are different colours and smells. We have provided various tools for the children to investigate the dough and encourage them to see how they can manipulate the dough in various ways. The colour and smells of the dough also allow for discussion lead by the educators which encourages the children to use their other senses.
Giving the children the opportunity to paint allowed them to explore the substance by sliding their fingers through and making marks on paper. Often the children have shown extended concentration by sitting and doing several paintings.
Cornflour Gloop was another activity the children enjoyed and showed real interest in feeling how the texture of the gloop changes from being hard when still on the table but soft and dripping when moved with our hands.
This is something we will be continuing with next month as we expand on the children’s interests and encourage their exploratory and investigative skills. Our aim also to develop the children’s curiosity and creativity skills.
Please let us know if there is a particular messy activity your child loves, and we will include it in our programming!

Miss Katie and Miss Mama

TODDLERS ROOM

Wow what a month we have had in the Toddler room. We continued enlightening the children’s interests in stories by ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ inside and role playing the story out in the yard. Miss Aida helped the children paint paper cups to make little caves that the Bears could hide in and Miss Charlotte made slime with the children to replicate ‘thick oozy mud’. The children had immense fun getting messy and exploring and discussing the texture. (LO 1.3)

The weather this month has sparked some interest, the children loved the wind and running around excitedly in the rain, developing their physical and motor skills. There has also been an influx of intriguing insects to observe and talk about because of all the rain. The children are becoming very effective communicators (LO 5.3) We celebrated Chinese New Year with tasting some new food to expand our knowledge of different cultures which the children actively participated in and enjoyed.
Miss Laura

OUT OF SCHOOL CLUB

 

The children have had a great interest in the memory cards and build and roll game.  There is lots of brainstorming and problem solving required for these games.

We have been talking about feelings and being kind to our friends and others.  One of the children brought in a decorated box and we have decided to use it as our reward box.  If any of the children are kind, respectful and their friends notice that they write it on a paper and drop it into the box and at the end of the week the child with the most pieces of paper receives a certificate.

We have also been busy with a project –  which all the children are involved in making a castle from sustainable resources.  The children have had some great ideas as they build the different parts of the castle.

Miss Melanie

PRE-KINDY

Getting back into our normal routine, now that school is back. We had said goodbye to some of our friends that left for Kindy and pre-primary but got to gain some new friends. Forming a new group of friends sharing and caring has been a big learning topic this month. Taking turns and letting other children join our game and even sharing things we are playing with. Our new sand timer has helped us to be patient, as well as to be aware of time and waiting for our turn.

Now that we have some new children and children that go to Kindy some days of the week, they are teaching the other children some new games. Very often they form groups of five to eight and play group games such as dog and the bone, they also love playing families and dance concerts.

This month we have been doing lots of cooking which the children have been very interested in. After we make cupcakes for one of our kid’s birthday. The children really enjoy mixing all the ingredients together, so they started making sand birthday cakes for each and play dough cakes, each taking turns blowing out the candles.

we have also started progressive morning tea. Which is like a buffet style, the children really enjoy getting to choose when they wanted to eat morning tea. They also enjoyed the independence of going and helping themselves to what they feel like eating.