Mattingley

Dear Mattingley families and friends,

What a wonderful first week back we have had together. Unfortunately Mrs Rocca has been unwell this week, however we were lucky enough to see her Thursday morning when she helped us bring the clay into our classroom. Before we started exploring we thought very carefully about what we though the clay might be like. We started by thinking about what it might feel like.

Soggy- Lochlann S

Hard- Felix

Gooey- Chloe

We then began to think about what it might look like.

Grey- Leo

Orange- Sammy

Red- Marcel

We then thought about where it might come from and what we might be able to do with the clay.

It’s dirt- Felix

It come from the garden- Sammy

We can make it into something so we can keep it forever- Felix

Keep it for 100 days- Leo

You can put it in the oven then it will be frozen so you can play with it- Sammy

You can squeeze it- Chloe

You can put in on your shoes- Edward

Poke it with your thumbs- Lochlann S

Put it in a pot- Fred

I make a ball- Roy

Roll into snake- Jed

Race it down- Josh

Squash it- Ashton

Together we cut the clay into large chunks and began to investigate using our senses.

It sticky- Josh S

Squashy- Lachlan B

Feels good- Sammy

It’s cold- Marcel

Smells like clay- Lochlann S

We have offered the clay to the children this term as it is an outstanding sensory development activity for their hands, especially their fingers. At three we are all still working on our fine motor skills and dexterity. The acts of rolling, squeezing and forming the clay help them to further develop their fine motor skills. We will be focusing on the fine motor development of our hands and fingers this term, working towards holding pencils and the pincer grip getting ready to begin more meaningful mark making and letter formation. Please feel free to spend some time with your child exploring the clay. Simply the act of molding clay in one's hands whether you're a child or an adult can be extremely calming.

We hope that Mrs Rocca is beginning to feel much better over the weekend. We have missed her very much and are looking forward to having her back in the classroom next week.

Kimberley Mason and Coney Rocca

Langley

Dear Langley families and friends,

The start of term 3 has been full of new faces! We have welcomed Archie, Grace, Jaiyen, Jordan, Mason, Nicholas, Oliver.F and Sebastian to the Langley room this week. There have been a few tears at drop offs in the morning but all our new friends are settling in really well. 

Jaiyen and Nicholas enjoyed working on their throwing skills outside with the balls. Archie and Mason have been exploring the play dough with cutters and rolling pins. Jordan and Oliver. F worked at the puzzles table and Sebastian and Grace have loved finding our frogs in their tank. All our older children have helped guide our new children throughout the day, holding hands to lunch and showing them how to wash their hands.

Also this week, the children have been keen to play in our huge cubby house. They have been bringing the babies in to care for them, parking their prams inside and playing peek-a-boo through the windows!

Could all our new children please bring in a recent family photo so we can add you to our family wall. The children love looking at these photos, sharing facts about their family and helps with the settling in process to see familiar faces.

Enjoy the sunny weekend!

Sarah, Brooke, Emily and Renee 

  

Mead

Dear Mead families and friends,

It is lovely to see everyone back from their breaks and ready to commence Term 3!

The children really enjoyed using their creativity and imagination while using white chalk on the outside blackboard. It was great to see them engaged as they created an array of patterns and illustrations.

We resumed our Chinese lessons this week! It was great to see how many children used their memory skills and were able to recall previous lessons.

Muddy puddles have continued to be a strong interest with children however with a lack of rain towards the end of the week and some beautiful sunshine they have disappeared.

We hope you have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Prest, Miss Elodie and Mrs Nacca

Edgerley

Dear Edgerley Families

What a wonderful first official week in Edgerley! It was great to be able to welcome such a lovely group of children into our classroom and just perfect to see Miss C coming with them. 

The children spent the first week showing us what wonderful grown up four year olds (and almost four year olds) they are and Emma and I have been so impressed with their excellent engagement in the classroom challenges. 

We’ve had lots of fun getting to know everyone and look forward to finding more out about each other as the weeks progress. 

This week we started to explore structures and buildings by attempting to make 3D structures using only strips of paper. It was hard to work out what to do until we put our heads together and brain stormed some ideas. We created a chart of ways to change our strips of paper so that they would stand up. We created loops, circles, arches and folds, we even scrunched paper to create volume! What a great idea. We plan to use some of the ideas we explored about height in other building challenges throughout the term.

We also began to explore colours and how they are created. We worked together again to create a list of all the colours that we knew. But there were a few colours that we could observe but couldn’t name. One was the reddy/purple colour of our uniforms, what is that colour called? We thought we might be able to ask people at home if they knew the name of that colour. We can’t wait to see next week if anybody can tell us what it is. 

Charlie O also wanted to add the colour of Mrs Bishop’s cheek to the list, we explored ideas like pink, white, brown and red but when we held those colours up to her skin we knew we needed another name.  “It’s pinky orangey” Charlie O described. I wonder if anybody can discover a colour name to describe it? We mixed our own colours with ink at the light table and were amazed by what we saw.

“I just mixed the colours together and made black! It’s magic!” said Hamish

“I made green, I put a blue on top of another colour” said Aston

“Oh no, I made completely brown!” exclaimed Rory

“If you mix yellow and blue it makes green” said Aidan

Green was very popular but we also managed to spot orange and purple. Our more enthusiastic participants consistently created many shades of brown. We will continue to explore colour mixing using different medium next week.

On our way back from the gym this week some students discovered a  worm attempting to cross the path so he was immediately scooped up to take back to class for observation. We read a book about worms and discovered that they are the friends of the garden.

You might have noticed that we have begun to create a  garden in our classroom, attempting to germinate seeds as well as carrot tops and celery ends. We will observe them over the coming weeks to see what happens. We talked about the parts of plants and began to discuss what plants might need. If you have a small indoor plant that would appreciate some love over the next semester feel free to send it in for us to care for.

With such a wonderful start to the term the world is out oyster next week with lots of ongoing investigations and interests. Looking forward to seeing you all again next week.

Love from Mel, Emma, Cris and Satin

Angwin

Dear Families and friends,

The Angwin children have really enjoyed being back this term. We have noticed that some of us are taller, some have even lost a tooth and we have had lots of fun sharing what has been happening in our lives over the holidays. Our new friends have fitted in beautifully and it has been heart-warming to see the way our old Angwin friends have welcomed them immediately into their play.

During our show and tell, we enjoyed hearing about everyone’s holiday experiences. We heard about Teddy’s overseas adventure, holding a real eagle! Oliver had an adventure at the beach collecting real lava rock from an extinct volcano….

This led us to start thinking about volcanoes and how they have been made and what happens when they erupt… We did a fun experiment with our own sand volcano…

Wolf: It came out… the lava!

Liam: The volcano exploded!

Rosie: All the bubbles popped and they exploded lots and lots!

Antonio: All the lava came out and I think it was water!

Denver: It looked pink to me!

William: It looked like our volcano was real bubbles were popping out!

Regan: It was erupting.. We used a bottle instead of rock!

Harry H: The volcano was having lava coming out like a real one!

Welcome back everyone! We are looking forward to many adventures and fun this term!

Kind Regards,

Pip Cooper and Wenting Hao

Are you over-parenting? ; 3 ways to balance your parenting approach - Michael Grose

It’s a quirk of twenty-first century parenting that we need an objective measure to assess our parenting. Past generations were satisfied with more subjective measures such as whether their kids were happy; whether they got good marks at school; whether they were employable; and whether or not if they stayed out of trouble (read goal in extreme cases)! It’s safe to say the parenting waters were far clearer in the past than they appear to be now. But the parenting industry has come a long way in a short time so we now have stringent indicators that let us know what parenting track we maybe on. And that, for many people, would appear to be the over-parenting track. You know you are over-parenting if: 1. You take on all, or nearly all, of a child’s problems. Kids are good at handballing their problems to their parents. They’ll bring disputes with siblings for you to sort; expect you to take forgotten school lunches to school and pester you to organise their after-school lives. Mums and dads that over-parent invariably end up sorting out all their children’s problems which may make life easier in the short-term, but can mean kids become more dependent on their parents than children in the past. Point to remember: Leave some problems for kids to solve 2. You regularly do for a child the things he or she can reasonably do for themselves. It’s an irony of modern life that the busier parents get the more we tend to do for kids. In the race to get things done we dress young children; prepare children’s snacks and accompany them on trips outside the house even when they are old enough to do these activities themselves. If your child is becoming more rather than less dependent the older he becomes then it’s probably time to reassess your parenting. Point to remember: Never do regularly for a child the things they can do for themselves. 3. You parent the individual and not the gang If you are constantly trying to make sure life is smooth for each child then you are probably parenting the individual, rather than for the good of the whole family! I’m not talking about ‘playing favourites’, but having an intense focus on meeting each individual’s wants can often be at the expense of family life in general. For instance, you allow a child to go on a sleepover rather than attend the birthday of a sibling. Parenting the gang means that children need to fit into the patterns of family life and don’t always get what they want. Point to remember: Raise your small family with a big family mindset. Most of the research indicates the authoritative approach as ‘parenting best practice’. Authoritative parenting is a mix of firmness and warmth; discipline and nurturance; high expectations and relationship building. It’s an approach that sits… surprise, surprise… somewhere between over-parenting and under-parenting. Yep, as always a balanced approach to parenting, as to most things in life, seems to be the best way to go. Who would’ve thought it!

Emma McKenzie

Teacher - Edgerley Room

Wellbeing Facilitator

Wilkins

Dear Wilkins Friends and Families,

We have had a wonderful first week back! We have sadly said goodbye to our children who moved up to Cooper class, but have welcomed our wonderful new families and enjoyed hearing about the adventures some of our existing children got up to on their holidays. 

Starting the new term it has been lovely watching our existing children support their new class members. We have witnessed empathy through the tears at morning drop off and general inclusion throughout daily activities and spontaneous play. We are thrilled with the new little personalities in our class and cannot wait to watch friendships grow over the next term.

This week in the workshop we have been balancing on obstacles and patiently waiting in line, making up rolling games using filled water bottles to see whose bottle reaches the end first, and making robot costumes out of plastic connector blocks. The imaginations we have in this class are always surprising us and keeping us very entertained!

We hope you have a great weekend and look forward to seeing you all next week.

Mrs Jess, Mrs Nicole, Miss Georgia and Miss Kim  

  

Chapple

Welcome back to Term 3. 

We have slithered our way into Week 1 and our literacy program. We have made “s” snakes and created our own versions of Matisse’s snail. Even in PE we practised slithering under the ropes. 

We have looked at our senses and how they can keep us safe. We investigated sight and how if we can’t see, it can be dangerous. Even if we can see, we need to look where we are going! Maxime reminded us that our sense of smell is really useful, if there is a gas leak. 

We were lucky enough to go to the library and listen to Mrs Buchanan in their new Australian reading area.  

Martin Charlwood

Chapple Room

Cooper

Dear Cooper Room families,

It has been a wonderful and busy first week in the Cooper room this week. We have been lucky enough to have Miss Renee from the Langley room in our class to help settle the children into the new classroom. I am so proud of how all of the children have embraced the move up to the “big Cooper class” and have been happy to embark on their next learning journey in the 3 year old room.

The children have particularly enjoyed engaging in imaginative play with the small machines in the sandbox in the classroom. We have had to negotiate with our peers and share these popular resources, which we have done very well this week. This experience led us to build a large wooden road for our trucks and machines to move along after we had collected sand.

We had a very exciting day with the chickens on Thursday. After our morning we went outside as usual to the Town Square and noticed that the chickens were not in their chicken coop, they had been let out by a teacher to roam around and explore the big yard! The children were extremely excited that they were able to get up close and pat the chickens. After lunch we collected all of our left over salad scraps and fed them to the chickens. We noticed that the chickens particularly liked the cucumber. While we were reading the story “Hattie and the Fox” we had a chat about our chickens in the ELC.

What did we feed the chickens?

Cody – We feeded the chickens the salad.

Royce – and bread.

How did the chickens eat the food?

Royce – with it’s beak.

Ed – that’s the beak (pointing to his nose).

What colour are our chickens?

Brian – Brown

Royce – Yellow

Larissa – Orange.

Ed – Its all of the chick chicks

Over the next few weeks we will be collecting and counting the eggs with the Chapple room and recording our information in the classroom.

It has been lovely to see the children interact and develop new friendships with each other, especially children who are new to the Early Learning Centre. Each day we are discovering more about each of the children’s individual personalities, their strengths and interests. I am looking forward to where this will take us in our emergent curriculum this year. 

Happy Birthday to Lotti and Yash who both turned 3 this week!

We hope that you have a lovely weekend.

Love,
Miss Gilbert and Miss Renee