Grandparents day was beautiful and very special and we so enjoyed meeting grandparents for the first time, and for the second and third time for some. The children were asked what they wanted to do with their grandparents and they suggested that they show them how they make volcanoes in the mud patch, and they wanted to show them how they could do their ‘tough mudder’ obstacle course! So they did!

The visit by the fire fighters was awesome, as usual.

Our children were very considerate for the orientation day for the 2017 children and we were very proud of them.

We have started discussing Christmas and what this means to the children. Rather than focus on ‘getting’ we are in the process of discussing with children about ‘giving’; would they like to make a present for someone? We will be presenting some simple ideas that they can use, such as Christmas decorations, Wow Books, bracelets and necklaces, and paintings. They can choose whom they would like to make it for, and we will provide paper to wrap it.

The children can use the skills that they have refined at Kindy to do this. Not everyone will do it, but we do encourage children to think about it, and we had a very good response to making things for dads for father’s day, and for the Grandparents.

We are making the most of every opportunity to discuss letters, numbers, words, shapes and other aspects of literacy and numeracy. We have been putting a sticky dot on children’s left or right hand, and helping them to work out ‘right’ and ‘left’. When they remove the dot from their hand, they have to place to place it on the same side of their body, e.g. if it was on the left hand, then it must go on their left knee, left ear or left arm! This takes time and practice to work out right and left, but it is important. We are also encouraging children to identify individual sight words such as ‘is’ and ‘the’ in the stories we are reading- big books are good for this in shared stories, and many children are becoming quick to identify these and other words.

The children have continued with their interesting building projects- a group of boys have building a ‘Healthy McDonald’s’ for several weeks, and another group have been making a cubby in what they call the ‘adventure playground’ using hammer and nails in large pieces of wood.

We discussed the fossils from the museum and this led to children making their own fossils out of clay imprinted with model dinosaurs heads and feet. We plan to make plaster casts of these to follow on from the work the children have been doing on a ‘dinosaur museum’. They are still finding dinosaur bones in the yard each day. They ask Daniel to identify which dinosaur they came from, and which part of its body….