May 2018 Newsletter

Dates to remember: 

From the Office

Welcome to another edition of our newsletter. This month we will hear from the rooms but firstly I just want to share a couple of things that have been amazing for the centre over the last month or so.

Firstly, in case you missed other posts about this - I am so pleased to announce that we received MEETING NATIONAL QUALITY STANDARDS for our assessment and rating that was undertaken.  This is a wonderful achievement and the Footprints Sunnybank Educators are proud to have their hard work acknowledged. We strive to deliver quality care to all, each and every day.

 I would love to thank all the mothers and grandmothers that took time out of their busy day to come and have afternoon tea with us here at the centre. It is always a pleasure to see people attend things we organise, after all we do it for you :-) We enjoyed playing a game during this afternoon session and the fruits of the mum's and grandmother's labour is proudly on display at the front entrance of our centre. A big congratulations to all our Mother's Day raffle winners also.

I just want to remind families of a current promotion we are running here at the centre that you might like to take advantage of - its the recommend a friend for 2 weeks free. If you have friends or family that are looking for child care and recommend our centre to them and they start, after 4 weeks of enrolment both you and your recommended family will receive 2 weeks free child care. For more information about this please feel free to check out the information on our Facebook page or come and speak to me. We look forward to encouraging more people to come and join our Footprints family. As they say - the more the merrier !

Now please read on as we share some news from the classrooms.

With a smile :-)

Glenda

From the Nursery

 Hi Everyone, this year is truly flying by isn't it.

In the past two months we have welcomed a number of new children and their families to the Nursery room and centre. Welcome Maddison, Xena, Zoe and Aditya.

We have seen lots of changes in our physical development lately with all our friends actively increasing in their mobility. We have seen friends progress from tummy time to rolling and turning on their tummies, we have seen friends only sitting move on to crawling and furniture walking while others have taken first steps to progressed to running. It has been great watching everyone develop their confidence.

On Wednesday 9 May we celebrated Mother's Day with a lovely afternoon tea in the Nursery room, thank you to the mothers who were able to make it, it was a wonderful afternoon filled with fun, laughter and chats.

April saw Miss Bernadette leave for a few weeks on holidays, we had the lovely Miss Rupa and the very energetic Miss Alison take over and continue our care and continued to foster our ever growing selves.

April also saw us Celebrating Anzac Day as we showed our support and thanked those who served and are still serving as we read a few stories based around the Anzac's and the day, followed by listening to the Last Post as we experience Rosemary, smelling, tasting and feeling. If you haven't seen the photos they are available in the Centre's Facebook page.

As the year continues we are beginning to explore new interests such as role playing, creating noise and sounds and expressing ourselves and making choices.

Stay tuned on the Nursery Facebook page to see what we get up to daily.

Miss Bernadette and Miss Dana

From the Toddler Room

 Dear Parents

Hello, a warm welcome to all the parents. As the days are going faster the Toddlers are learning more exciting things while they are here at Footprints Sunnybank.

As I have been given the position in the Toddler room this year as group leader I want to assure you that each and every day I am doing my best to provide your children with the best care, guidance towards their learning and achieving their goals towards the early years learning framework.

Over the last few months we have been focusing on learning about our sharing and taking turns with our friends during the group times. We have also introduced and are singing the good morning song every morning as it gives opportunity to the children to recognise themselves who they are, identifying others in their class and that they all belong together in the same room. This also is encouraging them to point to their friends if they can recognise their friend's name being called as well. I am trying my best to sit with each child and having valuable one on one interactions, and teaching them how to hold pencils, crayons and encouraging them to draw a few lines on the paper. Some of the children are still trying their best to hold their pencils, as some of the children are ready to learn their next step.

The Toddler children are also recognising their pictures on the water bottle table to place their water bottles on the right spot.

Toddlers are also loving exploring new sensory materials. My weekly programming is more based on children's interest during the day. I have been adding more painting, home corner play, playing with cars that make sound. The children respond when they hear sound and music. While having painting out on the table with the paintbrushes, they show more interest painting with their hands, and feeling the texture of it. While they mix all paints together they even know what happens when all the colours are mixed together - they tell their educators it's a rainbow colour.

Toilet training is starting to happen as some of the children are in the process of being transitioned to the next room – Junior Kindy, I am encouraging them to sit on the toilet during nappy change time. I have been encouraging more Auslan communications during the day as well, as some children know are familiar with signs and it helps with the communication for example, toilet sign for going to the toilet, it makes them to understand easily with Auslan communication as they know the sign means toilet and can identify the word with the sign and what we are doing/explaining.

We have also done some beautiful group and individual activities for the Anzac and Mother's Days. The Toddler children did some wonderful artworks to help recognise and celebrate these special occasions. We are doing our best here at Footprints Sunnybank to teach the children and meet their goals towards the learning frameworks.

Kind Regards,

Miss Rupa. 

From the Junior Kindy Room

Oh my goodness Parents, it is now the middle of the year just about, this year is going by very quickly but we have been enjoying every moment. We have had some fun times welcoming some new friends and celebrating some of our friends 3^rd birthdays so far HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Abigail, Purvi, Jacob and Polly. We would also like to thank the parents who came to the Mother's Day afternoon tea, it was fun.

The children have been showing good matching skills with our letters and numbers recognition. So much so that now when they are role playing in their activities they are showing their friends what they have learned. The Junior Kindy children have also been learning about different shapes and are showing slowly how they can match them up in their puzzles to make special pictures.

As to how the toileting is going with our friends, it is going really good and the children are showing how quickly they are picking it up. We would like to thank the parents for their part in this developmental process, because of your cooperation with this, it benefits the children greatly as they are receiving continuous care from all of us from home to Junior Kindy. Great teamwork guys ! 

The Junior Kindy children will be continuing to learn how to recognise their letters and slowly learn what letter their names start with, they will also continue increasing their recognition skills with their numbers, shapes and colours too.

Friendly reminder to parents to please make sure that you are packing enough undies and spare clothes, as children do have accidents. Also we would like to remind parents when packing your child's late afternoon tea snack to please do not pack chips, popcorn and/or anything that contains nuts.

Thank you, until next time

Miss Catherine and Miss Alison 

From the Senior Kindy Room

 Hello Everyone, how are you? We are having too much fun with our learning and we have been establishing very good relationships with each other here in our Senior Kindy room. We have been focusing on our numbers and letters and also days of the week, month, year and weather. The Senior Kindy children are showing their interest in group time and group-based activities at the moment and are learning how to share with their friends during these activities, which has been great to see. In the upcoming months, I would like to invite all parents to contribute their ideas and suggestions on all the aspects of the operation of our child care, so we will work together - we are always striving to be the best we can be and if you have any suggestions to help with this, please feel free to share your input anytime.

The Senior Kindy children are having discussions about our hand washing procedure and why we must wash our hands before and after each meal, and after using the toilet. We have been having discussions about personal hygiene as well. In our discussions we always talk about having a bath/shower every day and to brush our teeth and hair, this assists us in ensuring we can be nice and clean and its very important for our good health. We are very busy each and every day with our daily routines, our activities and our art and craft activities. We made hand print bunnies for Easter and Poppies for Anzac Day. All the children were showing interest in listening to the story behind how Anzac Day came about. We also held our own parade and saluted our heroes of Gallipoli. We respect all the cultures and share their values and aspects with the children. Recently we have been busy with making Mother's Day presents, we hope you enjoyed the gifts? The children love to do art work and they enjoy doing paintings and love to choose their own colours. They are showing great interest in all activities planned for them to assist their curiosity and learning, they are also great at creating their own activities as well which is also great to see.

At the moment the Senior Kindy children's ABSOLUTE favourite activity is home corner and dress up. They enjoy being free to use their imaginations and it has been great to see and hear what they come up with during their play. They have been things such as hairdressers, chefs, bus drivers (complete with making their own bus using chairs in the classroom), taking picnics at the park and beach etc.

We celebrated Miss Glenda's birthday as well and we sang Happy Birthday to her and wish her all the best always.

In closing, I would like ask our Senior Kindy parents to please remember to bring your children's bed sheets and spare clothes as we don't have spare clothes in the centre anymore because of our policy, so we don't have anything to change your children into when they have an accident, if they need to be changed and there are no spare clothes available in their bags, we will have no choice but to call you. Also, please bring your child's sunscreen if you don't have one. We value and encourage the families to please share your children's interests with us so we can include this in our curriculum so that we can provide more opportunities for learning for your children in their early years. if you have any concerns please see me (Miss Amandeep). I am keen to hear from you.

Thanks Miss Amandeep.

From the Kindergarten Room

 Hi everyone, hope you all have been keeping well ?Here in the Kindergarten room we have been amazing. We are still continuing with our learning of how to spell and write our own names. We are already comfortable when Miss Sinead is writing our names on a piece of paper and we are able to copy what has been written but now we are starting to see if the children are able to remember on their own. If you are doing some writing with your child at home can you please encourage your child to hold the pencil using correct pencil grip, as that is what we have been doing here. It is much easier to make adjustments now than try to change an established habit in later years.

This last month we learned all about ANZAC Day. We made a display with posters and held our own ceremony. At the beginning of our ANZAC ceremony we invited Miss Glenda to come and join us. Miss Glenda read us a story which explained a little bit about this teddy that was so old - he went to war with the person that owned him and then teddy got passed down to the veteran's (man who went to war) grandchild. After listening to the story, we then stood in respect while we listened to and or sang along to both the Australian and New Zealand National Anthems. After singing both Anthems we listened and remembered whilst the Last Post was playing. We previously had made wreaths and so then, pairing up - together we walked side by side to lay our wreaths at the bottom of our Anzac display. Miss Sinead, Miss Eseta and Miss Glenda were so proud of everyone!

Through this whole month, we as a class have been sharing/ reading stories, dancing, singing, exploring, investigating, enjoying experiences and telling stories through dramatic role play with all of our friends that are here in our class (we hope you enjoy some of the photos).

On Thursday the 24^th of May we are going to be having a Superheroes and Villain dress up day. We have been telling Miss Sinead about how cool the Villains and Superheroes that there is in the super heroes' movies (Harley Quinn, Joker) while running around outside all of the children take turns in who is going to save the day and who the villains are.

Things to Remember:

• We start our first group time at 9:15am this is where we are learning all about the letters/ counting/ how to spell our names and days of the week. We have also started to learn about under the sea. So it would be awesome if all children could be here before this time.

• Can you please check if you child has enough sunscreen in our sunscreen basket if not are you able to bring more?

• Please remember to pack a jacket or jumper and warm clothes as it is starting to get cold out in the mornings.

• If you have any old magazines or travel guides are you able to bring them in so that we can use these for our cutting practice as we love to cut pictures out from these kind of magazines.

Thank you,

Till next month – Miss Sinead and Miss Eseta