15TH SEPTEMBER 2017 Simone’s Message By Ms …...1 REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL | ST LEONARDS...

1 REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL | ST LEONARDS NEWSLETTER 1

Simone’s Message By Ms Simone Cooke, Principal

Dear Parents,

What beautiful Spring weather we have been enjoying at school this week! The children have so enjoyed being able to go out into the beautiful sunshine. With the warmer weather, could I please remind our parents of the younger children to include an extra change of clothes in their bags as the children are starting to engage in more sand and water play during their outdoor free play and as a result often require a change of clothes by the afternoon. Including a light cardigan or jumper is also a good ideas as it is still getting cool in the evenings.

NO HAT NO PLAY With the sun increasing in intensity all children are required to bring their Reddam hats (clearly labelled) to school each day. These hats have been designed with safety in mind. The broader rim offers greater protection than many of the caps and elasticised hats that children bring from home. Teachers apply sunscreen prior to going outside both morning and afternoon, but as the weather warms up I suggest that you also apply sunscreen before the children arrive at school each day.

REDDAM MULTI FORM Could I remind all our parents that our Preschool children who have turned Three wear our multiform each day during term time. Reddam prides itself on its uniform which has been designed to be practical and eye catching, whilst at the same time enjoyable to wear. There is no summer or winter uniform and any items from the multiform can be co-ordinated with each other throughout the year. From Term Four, all children in the Preschool will need to have purchased their multiforms , which are worn each day of Term. Children are invited to wear casual clothes during our Vacation Programme only. We are aware that some parents have had difficulty obtaining their uniforms as the school shop had run out of stock. I believe new stock has now arrived so if you need to place additional orders in readiness for next term, please contact the uniform shop on [email protected].

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.

15TH SEPTEMBER 2017


Reddam Beach The Hatchlings have ventured out and gone on their very first excursion to Reddam beach! We’ve been learning everything there is to know about Under the Sea, but one thing we haven’t done yet is go to visit the sea! With our buckets and spades ready to go, we walked from our classroom out into the front playground to where the big sand pit is. The Hatchlings were all so excited and loved playing, digging and building in the sand; it was so hard trying to get them to leave! What’s the beach without water too? With such beautiful weather this week we cooled down with some water play, they loved splashing and getting very wet. Learning about the different layers in the ocean we have discovered many things from things we might see like rocks and sand to the many different types of animals. One thing we haven’t explored yet are the colours of the sea. We opened it up for discussion this week and some of the Hatchlings said “yellow” and others said “blue”, we extended further and created some beautiful artwork all inspired by the many different blues we can find in the ocean. It was so incredible to see how each individual child interpreted the layers and colours, some children did spots, others did long beautiful wavy lines while others mixed all of the colours together making new colours! Come and have a look in the classroom, they all look fabulous! You all did an amazing job.

Stage 1 - The Nest & Hatchlings By Miss Hannah Wallace


Stage 1 - The Nest & Hatchlings


Taking care of our Garden As Spring is already here and the sun is shining upon on us, we have decided to expand our garden by preparing the soil and planting new seeds. Now that the days are getting warmer the children are spending more time outside, enjoying the warm sun and all that this new season has to offer. While working in our garden the children are using their senses to explore and to connect with nature. It allows them to sense the fragrances, sounds and sights of the garden and with this connection the children start to understand the value of living things. Time spent outside, either exploring our immediate environment or manipulating soil, water, seeds and plants has great value for the children’s lives. They learn about their world and how to look after it, by respecting nature and appreciating what it has to offer. Gardening has many benefits for the little people. It allows them to work as a team, promoting their communication skills, and giving them a sense of purpose and responsibility. As I have mentioned while gardening the children engage all their senses, touching and feeling the dirt, seeds and plants, seeing beautiful colours and varied sizes of the plants, watching the vegetables grow and smelling the scents of flowers but above it all it encourages healthy eating. Hopefully soon we will be collecting our vegetables and herbs from our garden and I am sure the children are going to be very proud of what they have achieved. I wish you all a great weekend with your beautiful children. “The glory of gardening: hands in the dirty, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” Voltaire

Stage 1: Fledglings By Miss Michele Santos


Stage 1: Fledglings


Stage 2 - Chicks By Ms Eva Lo Spring

Our Spring themed provocation has thoroughly engaged our children, who have embraced all the fun learning activities. We have enjoyed learning whilst exploring the beautiful flowers and growing seeds throughout the week. This week in the classroom we set up a lovely fine motor activity for the children. They were first encouraged to collect all the leaves in the garden for the activity. This provided lots of fun as the children searched for the leaves branches and flowers everywhere in the playground. They did a wonderful job , collecting a big basket of leaves to start their collaborative artwork and sourced materials for the fine motor cutting activities. The children were then invited to split into small groups for their scissor practice activity, which required close supervision as they were cutting small objects. We were very happy and surprised to see how many our the children were able to focus and concentrate on their cutting leaves and paddles. They did very well manipulating the scissors and using both hands to help by themselves. Eva: Do you need help, Makayla? Makayla: No, I do it myself! Carolyn: Wow! Look! Look! (With her exciting voice after cutting a leaf into a few pieces) Scissor cutting activities helps the children develop their hand and finger muscles work in a precise manner, and also encourages the children’s eye-hand coordination development. After cutting out different pieces from the leaves and flowers, the children were invited to create their beautiful “Windy Day” artwork on a piece of paper. Apart from the fun cutting activity, we have also been leaning about the weather in our group time, singing a new song about different types of seasons and weather patterns. For the extended activity we did a simple rain cloud experiment during our group time this week.


Stage 2 - Chicks


Stage 2 - Sparrows By Ms Emily Chacon

What a Nice Thing to Say

This week we have been focussing on our friends and being kind and discussing the benefits of having soft hands and using kind words. Each morning we have begun our days with saying good morning and saying a nice comment about a friend. The children have really taken to this experience and have been transferring this knowledge and kindness to others throughout the day.

As a continuation from our friendship discussing, we have begun a new group time game. ‘Sandy Boy/Girl’ is a song about a boy/girl who sits on a rock(pillow) and is sad because they are alone. They are then asked to stand, wipe their tears away and choose a friend to dance with. This play experience is beneficial as it encourages the children to share humour and happiness with others, as well as further developing relationships with their peers.

We have been continuing with our emotions provocation, the children have gained so much knowledge on each emotion and what makes us feel a certain way. This unit has had a positive effect to the children as it has assisted them with their communication of feelings during times they are upset, frustrated and even through happy moments.

As our main focus has been happiness this week, and we have created a game of ‘Guess whose smile’. Emily had taken photos of the children’s smiles and printed them out. As a group the children then had to guess whose beautiful smile each photo belonged to. The children loved this experience, clapping smiling and laughing as each child was guessed.


Stage 2 - Sparrows


Stage 3 - Robins By Ms Holly Lindsay What a Wonderful World!

As we step aboard our imaginary aeroplane once more. We were excited to journey our way across the Indian ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea until we reached Greece. There are many amazing experiences we participate in as teachers, but sharing these learning moments with families is possibly the most rewarding. Culture is the fundamental building block of identity and the development of a strong cultural identity is essential to children’s healthy sense of who they are and where they belong. “Research shows children are much more likely to reach their full potential in life when their family and education and care service work together. These benefits are evident when families and educators exchange information regularly and collaborate on consistent approaches to daily routines, child development and learning.” (ACECQA, Quality area 6) We began our week by looking into Greek mythology, the children recognised many of the characters from these stories as they appeared in many Disney movies. These ancient stories still have relevance in today’s teachings, as the wise men that wrote them had a hand in helping shape modern thinking.

Ancient Greek Architecture: We talked about how the ancient Greeks (and many other cultures still) used the post and lintel system because when you put a top (lintel) on several columns (posts), it can bear much more weight than any of the columns could individually. We looked at pictures of the Parthenon and other ancient temples.

The children were given eight cups each and a baking tray, they were all asked the question “Do you think you can stand on the paper cup?” they all answered ‘no!’. The cups were laid out and the baking tray was placed on top. All the children stared in amazement as the cups held their weight.

Mini Olympics: The children loved this so much that we extended it from one day to two.

Running races was definitely the favourite out of all the games, the children’s excitement was hard to contain as they waited for the flag to signal they could go.

Another favourite was ‘shot put’, obviously for safety reasons we couldn’t use an 8kg iron ball, so a bean bag took its place.

The other games included: Hurdles, Balloon handball Musical statues Bean bag and spoon race

Greek Feast: A huge thank you to Costas (Sofia and Christo’s Baba), Leah’s Papu ,Grandma and Rhonda who provided amazing dishes for our feast. Another thank you to Leah’s family who provided some amazing picture and story books from Greece.

The children are loving these routine cultural meal experiences. It’s amazing to see how adventuress our Robins are; they never shy away from an unfamiliar dish!

Next week is our last week before the Vacation Care starts. The final destination of our fascinating project will be Australia.


Stage 3 - Robins


Puzzles, Puzzles,Puzzles!

Letter puzzles This week the children had the opportunity to explore a letter puzzle. Each puzzle piece had a letter on it and the Kookaburras were invited to seek out a particular letter. After locating each letter, they then had the opportunity to search for other letters of interest and add them to their puzzle. We made some simple words such as cat, go, up and in. Some of the Kookaburras decided to extend this experience and make their own words. Sounding out the fictional words that were created was a way we practised sounding out the letters and we all laughed at the imaginary words that we had created. Photo puzzles Puzzles are such a great way to incorporate fine motor skills and cognitive thinking together. The group have shown a lot of interest in puzzles this week so I decided to make some new puzzles. I took photos of each of the children and made them into our own puzzles by attaching these pictures onto coloured paddle pop sticks. The paddle pop sticks were then cut into individual pieces to make a puzzle. The Kookaburras were very surprised when they saw their own photo made into a puzzle and had many questions about how we could make more puzzles in the future. Finn: “I think we should do a Spiderman puzzle” Sam: “I think Spiderman” Lucia: “Maybe a fairy puzzle” Isabel: “Elsa puzzle” Aadhya: “Princess puzzle” Aaron: “I think a Superhero puzzle” By providing a varied array of puzzles of the children’s interest kept them captivated for most of the morning. Positional language Exploring space activities, the Kookaburras developed their understanding of positional language. We started by reading the story “Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen. In this story he demonstrates the language of space and positional language, for example, over, under and through. To extend our understanding we took the opportunity to use a chair as our prop for this experience. We children were asked to go under the chair, stand on the side of the chair, go under the chair, go in front of the chair and on top of the chair. Some of us were quick to grasp this concept and others took awhile to feel confident to participate in this activity. Encouragement and praise was shared by the group as we assisted less confident participants to join in the game.

Stage 3 - Kookaburras By Ms Riina Andrew


Stage 3 - Kookaburras


Stage 3 - Fine Motor Activities


Loving Literacy! Creating Texts

‘Too Many Elephants in This House’

This week, the Flamingos have been working on creating their own story as a class. We used a story called 'Too Many Elephants In This House' which the children hadn't read before. With the words covered up we looked at the pictures and, using only the illustrations, we were able to re-write the entire story.

The children were very cooperative and worked well as a group to think of each part of the story. The children were so amazing with this activity. They made connections with previous pages and sentences, added speech from the characters and even put some funny aspects into the story which had us all laughing.

Skittle experiment

To extend on the children’s experience with colours and to have some fun with patterns, the Flamingos did an experiment. In small groups, the children needed to work out a pattern using skittles and place them around a plate. Once they had finished their pattern, the children were given a cup of warm water which was gently poured into the plate. After some time, the colours began to bleed and blend together to create a rainbow of colours following the patterns that had been made. The children had so much fun with this experiment and even though it was challenging to come up with a pattern (and not eat the skittles!) they persisted and accomplished their task!

Stage 3 - Flamingos By Ms Amanda McDonald


Stage 3 - Flamingos

Stage 3 - Flamingos

The Boy, Flowers and the elephants


Stage 4 - Cockatoos By Miss Bernadette Casey

Provocation: Why does it rain?

Another busy week with the cockatoos continuing to learn more about the weather. Their interest in weather phenomena and conducting experiments has really provided a boost in their involvement and interest. We built off our learning about clouds last week and began to look more at what happens in the clouds and how they form. Previous investigations into clouds have led the children to question where the rain comes from.

The children’s questions have directed us to discover the water cycle and how water changes its form. The children have thoroughly enjoyed learning about how water changes its state through experiments, both hands on and demonstrative. They watched on as hot water (heated from the sun, but in our case a kettle!) turns to vapour, and when it hits the cold air up high (our ice cubes) it changes into clouds. Collabora-tively the children created rain gauges to measure how much precipitation had fallen and began to link mathematical thinking and numbers and applying it to scientific con-cepts. Turns out, we have chosen a very dry week to learn about the rain!

Our experiments hang on the wall and as the children observed water droplets forming in their experiments and there was mass excitement to see the results of their hard work and learning. They were provided with the opportunity to engage in water play through-out the week, as well as art provocations that saw them use new tools and develop fine motor skills. The children enjoyed the opportunity to link their previous knowledge about the rain, the clouds and puddles to basic scientific knowledge about the water cycle


Stage 4 - Cockatoos


Stage 4 - Rosellas By Ms Sue Mayer

'Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.’ Benjamin Franklin

Children have an amazing ability to learn from one another. Every child has different strengths and when they share their strengths with others they all benefit. For children to learn to read and write and develop those important literacy and numeracy skills they also need to develop confidence in themselves as learners. The arts whether it be draw-ing, painting, singing, dancing, dramatic role play, music etc. gives children the free-dom to develop confidence in themselves as learners as they engage in their own inter-ests. Some children may not be interested in the visual arts but are interested in construction which in itself is a form or art it is when their peer brings along their friend to follow their interest that then the peer begins to wonder and explore a different interest other than the one they had before. This past week we have explored how the human body moves by making sculptures of a body that can move. Observing the artists body sculpture the children used pipe cleaners and cut up pieces of straw to create their own body sculptures. As they threaded their little straw pieces I could hear “I can't do this..” It was through watching their peers finish and words of encouragement that they persevered and ended with the proud feeling of accomplishment. Challenging children with activities that they have never done before allows children to grow and develop as learners. The real learning is that sense of accomplishment, finish-ing a task that before they thought they couldn't do. Gentle Reminder The weather is starting to warm up, please pack appropriate clothes for warm weather and include something warm in case the weather turns cold. Sydney weather is unpre-dictable. Also all children must have a hat.


Stage 4 - Rosellas Stage 4 - Rosellas


Music By Mr Justin Sze

The Stage 1s had an awesome week of sport, we started with a quick warmed up fol-

lowed by our problem solving exercises that children have been progressing through

over the weeks. Different colour hoops were laid out with the children placing the corre-

sponding colour bean bag inside. We have slowly progress to adding 2 different medi-

ums at a time which the children picked up and placed in the correct basket.

We finished off with a few animal exercises and free play with the soccer balls.

The Stage 2s started off with a running activity to get warmed up followed by our spatial

awareness and problem solving games.

Our first activity involved a game called kangaroo relays. This involved the children form-

ing different teams, while in their teams the children would then select a colour bean

bag and kangaroo jump through the corresponding colour. On their return a high five is

exchange for another team mates turn. The game has a focus on team work, colour

matching, relaying running and spatial awareness.

Our next game followed on with last weeks hoop island. Hoop island challenges the chil-

dren physicality and endurance and aims to build core strength and lower limb strength.

The Stage 3s and Stage 4s ha da action packed sports lesson where we revised previous

spatial games.

We started off with our Four corners game, the game involves the the children running to

different corners of the exercise area performing a variety of strengthening exercises.

Our next game is one of the children's favourites, sharks and islands which has a spatial

awareness focus. The children use the different hoops (island) as safe zones while trying

to avoid being caught by the shark.

We finished off with another favourite of a modified version of pac man. The children

navigate around the exercise area staying on the lines trying to avoid falling into the la-

va as well as evading the hungry ghosts. Each round the children are given different rolls

eg: the healer, the ghost or the PAC man.


Music


Drama By Miss Laura Hudson

The Nest/ Fledglings

This week the children went on a journey under the Sea. Using a number of drama techniques to enhance the story. Associating the sounds they heard to the pictures scattered around the room. Skills learnt this week: Memory Recall Listening and Following direction Mime Associating Sounds to animals

Activities include: The starting point to this week’s session was mime. They each had to mime an animal under the sea.

The children jumped the waves (skipping ropes) to find out what was under the sea.

Picture Postcard of Under the Sea (Stage 1 & 2)

Guessing game - Animal sounds from Under the Sea where played and the children had to guess what animal they were.

Stage 3 & 4 Objectives: This week the starting part of the lesson was a Live News Report from the Teacher. The children wanted to help find the missing person who the teacher had spoke about in the report.

They advanced the drama by doing their own News Report about the outcome of the missing person

Skills learnt this week: Hot Seating Memory Recall Working together Using their body to create a shape Listening and Following direction Mirroring one another

Activities include: A Live News Report from the Teacher was this week's stimulus Discuss the News Report, the importance of the News and the roles of the News reporter, anchorman etc. The children wanted to help find Fisherman Pete The first stage of the rescue was to jump the waves (skipping ropes). The children were split into two teams, using a hand signal; the two teams ran an jumped the ropes. A listening and memory game was then played - The Ocean is Calm. Each child was given a picture to sit on that either lives under the sea or needs the sea to survive. Each picture started with the letter S (seal, stingray, star fish, shark, squid) The teacher acted as the Fisherman, when one of the children heard the name of the creature they have been given they got up and walked behind the fisherman. When most of the players have been called out, the teacher called out, " The Ocean is stormy" At this; all the children already caught must find new seats. The child without a seat becomes the next fisherman.

A message in a bottle was found that was from Fisherman Pete, saying that he had been caught in the storm and had been swept upon an Island in the shape of a heart.

The children went on an adventure to find fisherman Pete upon which they said that they could see the Island in the distance, so they swam and got blown by the wind before making the shape of a heart as a group.

After looking high and low, Fisherman Pete (one of the children) was found hiding behind a co-conut tree, looking very sad, but as soon as he saw everyone he changed his facial expression (everyone copied his actions, mirroring him) to show a relieved face

The children came up with a creative way of how to get Fisherman Pete back home (Magic car-pet, flying shoes)

Hot seat - Fisherman Pete appeared on the News with some of the children interviewing him ask-ing him questions about his adventure


Drama


Happy Birthday Lyanna, Avissa and Callum

15TH SEPTEMBER 2017 Simone’s Message By Ms …...1 REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL | ST LEONARDS...

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