Welcome
Welcome to our May Newsletter. We have had a busy few months with lots happening within our service. Have you liked our Centre Facebook page to keep up to date with what is happening in the centre?
Development Matters
Find out what is normal speech sound development and what you can do as a parent to help. Please see the article attached.
Have you filled out your PEDS form? Please come to the office today. We require the form to be completed so that we can schedule your appointment with the Health Nurse.
As we continue on with our focus on learning to walk by ourselves it has led us to self-help skills.
Encouraging self-feeding at meal times and holding our bottles to and having access to our water throughout the day.
We continue to use 'loose parts' in our room which we have combined with our shaker/sensory bottles. And natural loose parts with some seed pods. We have provided additional empty containers with milk bottle tops, cotton reels, Pom poms threading beads & feathers for the children to make their own shaker/sensory bottles. We have also introduced sensory bags filled with different materials such as sand, oats and paint.
This provides them opportunities to practise their fine motor skills & hand eye coordination, extend their knowledge of knowing an object still exists even when they can't see it and explore mathematical concepts (size, weight, shape, counting and sorting).
We have also introduced more outdoor play and experiences, learning to use the obstacle course and constructing and exploring in the sand pit, encouraging interactions with the older children in the outdoor environment.
Miss Megan. Miss Zubaida & Miss Himani
In our Coolibah room, our toddlers have settled in and are understanding their room routines and enjoy using their imagination and creativity to explore and develop further interests.
This month, in our room we have created an area where we had only used recycled materials. We made an ice cream shop where we used cardboard and plastic bottles to create an ice cream machine and big cardboard moving boxes to create an ice cream truck. We also added in some pretend ice blocks and ice creams which were all healthy fruit flavours. The children have shown a lot of interest towards our shop and enjoy going into the ice cream truck with their friends saying "ice cream ice cream!".
Continuing on from last month, we have our mirror area where the children are able to see their reflections as they all enjoy making facial expressions and giggling about it. We will be keeping our mirror area for a while as the children show interest towards it.
Physical activity will always be a part of the program. Children are encouraged to engage the obstacle course and challenge themselves to see how further they can go. We will also take part in group activities at least once a week where the children can further develop their gross motor skills and understand having a healthy lifestyle.
Friendships are important for children as it helps to support their social/emotional development. Since the toddlers in our room have all made friends with each other, I can see that they are further developing their language skills as they try and communicate with each other while exploring and engaging in group activities. We will continue to encourage our toddlers to engage with each other and support each other daily.
Just a reminder, please remember to label your child's belongings e.g., jumpers, hats & drink bottles
If you have any questions, please approach the educators in the room and they will be able to assist you.
Thankyou
Miss Simran, Miss Sukh and Miss Tina
Hi families, we have been having a busy time in the Eucalyptus Room. The children have been learning about healthy food through art & crafts activities, discussions, role playing healthy cooking & participating in real cooking. Through the recycling challenge two of the things we made were a cardboard pizza oven & an oven. The children have really enjoyed role playing on these.
The children are also learning many self-help skills in the room like toilet training, following the routine, & looking after their belongings. The children have continued to develop their fine motor skills through various activities, & many of the children are able to correctly hold the scissors now & cut through the paper.
Some of the children's current interests include dinosaurs & block construction. We have extended on these interests by doing dinosaur activities & researching the names & some facts about dinosaurs. We have some great block construction sets in the room, & some of the children have been making some wonderful creations using blocks, loose parts, toy dinosaurs & animals.
We have enjoyed celebrating/remembering events in the community like Holi, Anzac Day & Mother's Day through art & craft.
We have just added some new items of interest for the children in the room. An aboriginal area with books, aboriginal colours & magnetic aboriginal words for the body parts, & laminated flash cards available to the children of alphabet letters with pictures, & colours with pictures. The children were quick to notice these new items & keen to play with them. We would also like to make a family tree, so if you could all bring in a family photo that would be great.
Miss Ruth, Miss Harmeet & Miss Bijal
Hello Families, welcome back to our newsletter of May, with current news about your child's learning and efforts. Children have been having fun while learning a lot of different things. Continue with our health and hygiene, effective hand washing plays a vital role so we are washing our hands every time we need to, so as to keep germs/infections away.
As the weather is getting cool we are following the rule of no shoes no outdoor play for the children to protect them from the cold weather. Sun safety is still important despite the cooler weather so send your child with a hat each day and please also apply sunscreen to your child upon arrival at the Centre. This helps to enhance the children's awareness of sun safety and allows them to take some responsibility of their own wellbeing.
Our Recyclable Library set up by Miss June is very popular among children. Parents are welcome to choose any book to take home and they can bring it back when they finish reading it with their children. It's wonderful to see children choosing the book of their own interest and asking educators to read for them.
This month we planted our sunflower seeds and watering them every day and see them growing. Caring for the environment and our surrounding is very important. We then painted our sunflowers on paper to see how they will look when grown. We will continue with planting different seeds for the next month too as children are taking interest in gardening
This month we have enjoyed learning some more fine motor skills such as gluing feathers, pompoms, painted hands on our creativity (cardboard) table which teaches us how to manipulate and use our fingers while maintaining our hand eye coordination. We have added some more Musical instruments to our class room.
Also remember you are most welcome to contribute to our program at any time, if you have anything you would like your child to learn.
Reminder:
Please label everything including bottle lids, dummies, hats, sheets and spare clothes.
Miss Monica and Miss June
Dear Paperbark families,
In month of April we welcomed into our room Pranvi. She is settling really well and we love having her.
We also recently welcomed Miss Clara into our room. She is doing an amazing job and bonding with children very quickly.
As you probably all know, for our recycled challenge we created a big cubby house. The children helped to paint it and decorate it. They absolutely love it and use it for imaginative play or role play daily. The children turn it into different sorts of places, such as shop, house, reading nook… Please vote for us!
We have been lately concentrating on alphabet, fruit, vegetables and shapes. We are going to continue to extend and build on this topic more in the upcoming months as well as concentrate on some new topics, such as numbers, animals, autumn and winter.
We would like your help with collecting some stuff for our hair dresser and beauty salon which we would like to create. Any empty shampoo bottles, colour boxes, hair sprays, moisturizer bottles, old hair dryer, brushes, hair accessories…anything will be appreciated and thank you in advance. If you haven't brought your family photo, please bring one or email us the photo so we can display on our Family tree.
Miss Anastazia, Miss Purvi, Miss Clara
I would like to start off by welcoming Miss Kelsey to the Wattle room who will be working alongside myself to provide many interactive and fun learning experiences.
I would also like to welcome the new children who have joined the Wattle Room along with their families.
The Wattle children have had so many wonderful learning opportunities over the last month with many milestones reached and all in just a month.
I'll just recap a few ... The days of the week they have mastered not to mention the months of the year, they have become professionals at the hand washing song. They have excelled with great confidence in these that some of the children even lead group time.
We have begun our letter recognition along with our name recognition. We know our shapes even the tricky ones like pentagon and octagon. We learnt through our alphabet flash cards that X is for X-ray and we even know that X-rays take pictures of our bones!
We can sing our alphabet and count to 20! Recite the pledge of kindness and Welcome to Country which we still need a little help with but we surely are on our way to knowing it off by heart. We have become better at sharing cause we all know that sharing is caring. The children even led me on a learning journey of their favourite story the Gruffalo which was quite new to me.
We have displayed our independence with setting the tables making our beds and most of us can even put our own shoes on although sometimes we like to trick Miss Sam and pretend we can't but Miss Sam knows we can and with just a little more encouragement we accomplish any task we take on. All this learning in such a short time I can only imagine what we will accomplish by the end of the year!
Miss Sam and Miss Kelsey
Kindergarten News
We have had another busy month in the kindergarten 1 room with the children learning all about how seeds sprout and what we need to make them grow. We all became scientists and performed lots of experiments and investigated various ways in which we can grow seeds. The children remained engaged and then we continued on to our investigation about the weather.
Our investigations focused on 3 types of weather; cloudy, sunny and rainy and it was discovered that the sun plays a major part in making the clouds and giving us water to rain healthy and grow our plants for our food.
In term 2 kindergarten 1 are focusing on literacy and our main focus will be letter recognition and formation of the letters in our names. We have made a great start and our hard work on our pencil grip has enabled us to be able to write, draw and colour. Lots of encouragement at home will allow us to continue to gain literacy knowledge that will help us transition to big school next year and beyond.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar story has been our most favourite story this week and we have been doing lots of play-based activities to extend on our interest. This week we have been reading the story and retelling it through sequencing and art work. We will continue to read the story as it teaches us numeracy, days of the week, healthy/unhealthy eating and literacy.
A big thank you to Miss Ruby who has been helping us to learn in Kindy 1. Miss Ruby is taking part in her practicum for her studies and has been with us for the past couple of weeks.
Miss Elaine and myself would like to thank all our lovely families for their support throughout term 1 and we look forward to another term where we will learn lots of great things that will prepare us for our transition to big school next year.
Miss Jacqui
Hello to all our families.
This month onwards, the children in the Kindy 2 room are focusing on learning Alphabets, Phonics and Name Recognition. This is to help them form a foundation of learning that is meant to help make reading easier. You can assist with this learning at home by playing Alphabet games and pronouncing each letter, reading books to the children and spelling out names for different family members to learn letters.
Currently the children have shown interest in a Sink and Float Experiment. We will be looking at various object's density, buoyancy, and textures to learn more on this. Children have been fascinated with certain objects as to why they are heavy but still float on water. We shall be investigating this aspect as well.
Our Resilience Program is going well, and children have responded to it positively. For those unable to attend Friday session, worry not as we do implement the session activities and strategies in class during the week by using worksheet and activities provided to us by Mr. Pink.
A kind reminder to all parents, kindly pick all your children's belongings by the end of the day so as;
- to create space for other children who attend on other days, who miss out on locker space and
- due to hygiene reasons, the bedsheets/blankets need to be cleaned.
We welcome any ideas, suggestions and questions that you may have in regards to our Kindergarten learning.
Thank You.
Miss Bhavna and Miss Tracy