Langley Room

Dear Langley family and friends,

We have been excitedly caring for our very own hungry caterpillars this week! We have been feeding them, observing and documenting their growth and talking about what is happening as they change and grow.

In the caterpillar – Jaanav

Eating the leaves, they are – Oscar

I see caterpillars. They eating – Patrick

Wow. I wanna draw them – Lachlan

They have stripes – Lachlan

Not spots, stripes – Patrick

They have stripes and the other ones do have white on them – Scarlett B

I drawing caterpillars – Scarlett D

Its caterpillar – Caitlyn

My draw sik (silk) worm – David

Look, I draw silk worms. BIG SILK WORM – Sylas

Three silk worms. A, a, a caterpillar – Angus T

The caterpillars are getting so big now that we have put some egg cartons in there for them to use. I wonder what will happen next……

We have also been busy practicing our fine motor skills using pegs to pick up pom poms, matching different shaped objects, serving and cooking in our Langley restaurant, doing full length self-portraits, making and blowing bubbles, experimenting with cause and effect, constructing with Mobilo and rehearsing for our Nativity! Phew, we are a busy little group!

Best wishes,

Jess, Kerry, Nicole and Emily

Carpenter needed !

We need a simple set of  steps made as one of our props for the Nativity play . If there is a handy parent who could help please let Miss Giorgio or Mrs Catt know (or Mrs Dry if you don't know these staff !)

Thankyou

Class Photos

Class photos will be on Tuesday next week (29th) at the following times :
9.00 Edgerley
9.30 Mead
10.00 Cooper
10.30 Langley
11.00 Chapple
If you have paid by phone please return your envelope with this written on it.  We have spare envelopes if yours is missing !
Please be here on time if you are coming in specifically as we will not be able to wait for children to arrive.
Sibling Photos :  if you have 2 children in the ELC and would like them photographed together please add $5 to your payment and write the request on the envelope.

Langley Room

Dear Langley Family and Friends,

We have been exploring letters at the light table this week using small coloured alphabet cups. The children have been sorting and stacking them and identifying letters that are familiar to them. We have been talking about the different shapes and features of the letters and words that begin with them.

We have continued our exploration of bubbles in the big yard and have enjoyed chasing the bubbles and talking about what they look like, what colours we can see, what size they are and what they feel like. Some of us have even had a go at blowing our own bubbles. We have discovered that this is a tricky skill to master; you have to get your lips and breath just right to make the bubbles come out!

Don’t forget next Tuesday is class photo day – payment needs to be made prior to this day if you want copies of the class and individual photos. Children who do not normally attend the ELC on a Tuesday are welcome to join us at 10.30am for our Langley photos under parent supervision.

Best wishes,

Jess, Kerry, Nicole and Emily

                                                

Cooper Room

Dear Parents and Friends of Cooper Room,

We have had a wonderful week in the Cooper Room observing our silkworms. We have one who is outgrowing them all ! A super-sized silkworm which is white with black stripes.

“Yeah no touch, cos’  dey eat your fingers!” Daniel

“The big ones have stripes,” Sze-Yong

“Dats the Mummy. You see there's the babies tired cos’ they have no stripes,” Daniel

“The Daddy might be having a sleep in the leaves, “ Archie

“The big one is eating leaves,” Amanda

“They are called Thailand leaves!” Archie

“I can smell the Mummy one. They eat the leaves and to sleep in. That’s how they get big” Jack

“How do they move? I think they use all those legs cos’ they got lots and lots of legs!” Chase

We have also been talking about our favourite animals during show and tell. It is always beautiful to listen to children describe the features of the animals and explain why they love them. We love elephants because they can splash and blow water, we like lions cos’ they have ears that hide in all their hair, we like giraffes because they have really long necks and even baboons because they can open the doors of cars and eat your fruit! We are a walking animal encyclopedia in the Cooper Room.

Another area of investigation this week has been our threading table. The children are loving the challenge of threading beads onto pipe cleaners. It has taken deep concentration but we have mastered it and created some gorgeous bangles and charms. The persistence the children have shown at this tasks has been amazing! They certainly have been working very hard!

Sadly we have also discovered Ode our class bear is missing! If you have seen our sweet Ode please return him to his friends!

Kind regards

Susan and Coral

Mead Room

Dear Parents and Friends,

This week our room has been sweetly scented with some incredibly beautiful roses from Miss Sarah’s garden. The children have had the opportunity to help mix muted coloured paints of various hues and do their own observational paintings of the roses. Their masterpieces are quite amazing! It shows the value in giving children real objects to observe and record in their own ways. Here are just a few samples of their beautiful work.

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Warmest wishes,

Emma, Pip, Sarah and Heidi 

Edgerley Room

Dear Edgerley Families and Friends,

We have silkworms! We have loved watching them gobble, gobble, chew, chew their way through multiple mulberry leaves. We are starting to make connections with Nicey, our previous inhabitant (the Monarch). Some of the children chose to draw pictures of their observations.

Harry A: It doesn’t have a big nose, but it has lots of tiny legs to help it move. This is the tree where the silk worms live. I think the people put glue on its feet so it can climb out.

Sebastian: The silkworm is eating lots and lots of leaves.

Jarrah: It tickles so much. I think it’s eyes are black.

James: He is eating bad leaves.

Louis has been extremely keen to get to know our crawling silkworms. He has spent a very long time watching, questioning and making observations.

“He’s just eating so fast and so much. Maybe it’s ‘cause it’s got a long body. They like leaves, every day and every night. I think we need to put more leaves. They won’t get hungry at night. Look at this tiny one. Not eating much. Look, this one’s not moving. Let me give him a push. Ahhhhh, he was just sleeping.”

The Edgerley children have been VERY excitedly counting from 0 – 100. In fact, we have been counting as much as we can using all sorts of things; bottle tops, fingers, counters, blocks… can you try it at home?

We are very exciting to welcome Mrs Rocca back next week. Congratulations to Mr Rocca on his muscle competition in Sydney. He is a very, very strong man. We concluded he might even be able to pick up Edgerley with all the children in it.

An enormous thank you to Mrs Cooper, Ms Adele, Mrs Nacca and Ms Renee who held the fort while Mrs Baird and Mrs Rocca were away.

See you soon,

The Edgerley Team

Chapple Room

Dear Families,

This week we have been busy enquiring biologists fascinated with living creatures. As well as continuing to study the human body, we’ve been learning about sharks.  During the holidays Seb Mac saw a shark on the beach at Coffin Bay.  This has led to the children wanting to learn more about sharks.  Miss Veltmeyer has proved to be a wealth of knowledge about sharks, but to extend our interests we borrowed some books on sharks from the library.

 ‘Sharks have cartilage’  Sebastian V

 ‘They bite, they have the turtle feelings so when a turtle comes they go gulp.  Great white sharks are only interested in seals and turtles and dolphins.’ William

 ‘They swim in the water so fast’ Abhi

 ‘They have got really sharp teeth.  I love the great white shark.  We like to read books about them and we like how they do leaps in the air.’ Jacob

 ‘I love Great White Sharks, we like reading about the Great White Shark.  They eat people, I have seen one eating a people.’ Seb Mac

 ‘Some of them have no teeth and they can’t eat you and you have to feed them baby food! I like those sharks, they are my favourite ‘cos if they try to eat you they can’t. There are even pig sharks, they have pig noses.’ Marcus

 ‘That some are sharp and some are not.  The white ones are dangerous.’ Leonardo

 We had our first visit to the Prep school to meet the reception teachers.

‘There were lots of big boys.  There were new teachers, Miss Kupke. There was lots of thing to do which I never done before.  It was lots of fun, it was so, so fun.  Do you why it was fun? Because I was building.  I build and build I made a little castle and a big fancy house. Also there was big boy stories. There were big boys hats and lockers.’ Hugo

The Tuesday children are looking forward to their visit to Mrs Burford’s class next week.

Diary date: December 5^th at 11am is the Chapple Graduation
Please let Mrs Dry know when your child's last day at ELC will be.

Langley Room

Dear Langley Family and Friends,

Welcome back for Term 4! We have a very busy term ahead of us with lots of exciting things in store. Many children have been interested in super heroes recently so we have begun some investigations, focusing on all of the good things that super heroes do. We have also talked about some of the things that super heroes do that are not so nice and whether we should be doing these things in the classroom. We have discovered that the children have a wealth of knowledge in this area and have been using the dress ups to create our own good super heroes.

They get bad guys – Lachlan

They go ‘super heroes to the rescue’ – Angelina

Sophie is – Angus T

They get scardies – Brooke

They are good guys – Lachlan

They dress up – Bernie

They up in sky – Sylas

They rescue people and they help them – Patrick

They do running, they do twisting – Scarlett B

We have also been using the water trough to explore numbers, fishing out numbered ping pong balls with the fishing nets and matching them to the labeled egg cartons. We have been engaging in some sensory exploration with bubbles and with shaving foam mixed with corn flour – this makes a wonderful gooey mess which is lots of fun to mold and play with if you want to try it at home!

We are still missing lots of family photos if we can please have one for each child as soon as possible so that we can continue our work on families this term.

Best wishes,

Jess, Kerry, Nicole and Emily

Class Photos

These will be taken on Tuesday morning 29th October. All children are welcome to come in to be part of this at the time allocated for their class. Payment envelopes have been placed in lockers today. These MUST be returned prior to the day for your child to have their individual photos taken.
The following times have been allocated for each class :
9.00 - Edgerley
9.30 - Mead
10.00 -Cooper
10.30- Langley
11.00- Chapple

Any enquiries please see Mrs Dry

Cooper Room

Dear Parents and Friends,

It has been lovely to see all our friends again after the holidays . We have welcomed back Isabella and a new friend Taysen to the class. We have been working hard on our independence skills to work better as a team. Just like Bob the Builder we know Teamwork works! We are making sure that everyone helps us to achieve our goals  - just like our Australian Animals cards. Together we all gathered enough cards that we have managed to fill the folder. What great team work! We love to sit and look at all the cards and talk about the animals we have seen or touched!

We have also been using a large variety of natural materials in our play this week. The children still enjoy creating new environments for our animals to live in, either our nocturnal house or our grassy landscape. Some children even created a Dino world for our older reptiles – complete with a fun slide and gates so they don’t escape into the classroom!

We have been using large mirrors at the painting easels to create full size self portraits and small mirrors to help us focus on our facial features in our natural college portrait.

Next week we will also have silkworms in the classroom so please send in any mulberry leaves as they are very hungry! It will be interesting to watch them grow and change. What will we see ?

Kind regards   Susan and Coral

Mead Room

Dear Parents and Friends,

We have had a lovely start to the term in the Mead Room with warm weather and fresh faces ready to investigate and discover many new things. We have welcomed some silkworms to the Mead room and the children are fascinated with the way they move and eat. Here are some of the children's reflections…

Tom:     They’re tiny.

Jock:     The eggs are tiny and grey and yellow… some have hatched. They might move and then turn into a                   butterfly.

Alec:     They’re eating leaves… mulberry leaves… they’re some tiny ones.

Toby:     I can see a Mummy and Daddy.

Harry M:     I can see worms.. them turn into butterflies.

Alex D:        I can see them walking.

James S: There are 2 more tiny ones… There’s a little black one.

Jacob:     They are curling up.

Tom:     I think that silkworm will fall through the hole in the lead.

Dougal:     One is trying to get into the leaf… just there.

Angus: I can see… that one is going into that large hole and that one’s on the box. Can they climb?

Josh: Some are little and some are bigger.

If anyone has a mulberry tree in their garden we would love to have some leaves… our silkworms are going to get very hungry!

Many Thanks,

Emma, Pip, Sarah and Cristina

Edgerley Room

Dear Edgerley Families and Friends,

An exciting start to the term! This week we welcomed our new Edgerley friend, Oliver H. All the Edgerley children have made a really lovely and genuine effort to include him and make him feel welcome! Oliver has loved playing with his new friends in the block area constructing all sorts of houses and creative structures. He has also really loved Ms Renee’s amazing array of fun songs. I am sure we will help the Holden family to feel welcome and part of our room.

This week we have really enjoyed socking the shelves in our supermarket and learning about how to make transactions. If you are at the supermarket with your child please encourage them to be part of the process! We have also loved talking about what we were like as a baby. Gabby brought in her baby brother Isaac and we were able to talk about how babies go from ‘tummy time’ to sitting up, to crawling and then walking. Mrs Baird was able to share about her toddler, Joshua and share some funny stories about how he runs! Very cute indeed!

Thank you to those of you who have brought in your family pictures. It would be fabulous if you could have a photo of EACH family member as we would like to use them to sort e.g. sisters, babies, mums, grandies etc. Let us know if we can help with printing and remember, they may go missing so please make sure they are copies.

Soon we will start rehearsing for our end of year Nativity. All Edgerley children will be given a role with a special costume. Please note that the Nativity will be on Thursday 21^st November at 11am in the ANZAC Hall. You are welcome to invite your family.

Enjoy your weekends together and we look forward to another great week,

Mrs Rocca, Ms Carla, Ms Renee and Mrs Baird

Chapple Room

Dear Families,

Welcome back to term 4! This week has been a great start to our last term in the ELC.  During the holidays the children started talking about the human body.  This has continued to be a favourite theme this week.  We have been learning about the bones, the organs and body systems.  James Williamson has brought in a fabulous book for us to share that explains all about the body, its different parts and functions.  We have also been exploring 

some other non-fiction books about the body, this has been a marvellous opportunity for us to talk about different types of literature. 

The children have also been looking at x-rays.  They have been making their own skeleton x-ray paintings. They have been making skeletons in the play dough as well.  If you have any questions about the human body the Chapple doctors are here to help.

'If we don't have bones we fall down' Raph

'The wind pipe is when you cough when food goes down it' Christian

'White blood cells eat all of the bacteria up' James W

'When you eat stuff and you are full it goes down through all the organs' William

'If bacteria comes in your body, the white blood cells come and get them' Samuel

'The red blood cells look like doughnuts' Eden

'Protein is good for your body' Abhi

Don't forget next week we start our transition visits to Reception.  Next week we will go with the Monday group and visit Miss Kupke's reception class.  We will be up in the Prep school from 9.23-9.55 am

Have a wonderful weekend!

Juliana and Pamela

Term 4 Unit of Enquiry

Our centre wide unit of inquiry for next term is Our Family Album. This has been our overarching unit of inquiry for 2013 and so we will continue to extend and explore this further in Term 4.

The central idea around this inquiry is - families shape who we are, where we've come from and who we become.

Our lines of inquiry are - family structure, roles and relationships within families, how families shape who we become.

Our guiding questions are - who belongs to your family? How do they belong to your family and what do they do in your family? How does your family influence and guide you?

Each individual class will take this unit of inquiry in different directions - that is all part of the adventure of inquiry! Please note that in addition to this unit of inquiry, each class will have other areas of inquiry that they will focus on during the term.

If you feel you can contribute to this inquiry in some way or would like further information about it, please feel free to discuss with your child's classroom educators.