Little Ducks Childcare Wilston

March /April 2018

We have had a strong focus on our local community here at Wilston this past two months and are looking to ensure these strong community ties continue into the rest of the year. Our first networking night for the year was a success with new families meeting each other and sharing some time with our educators. Karma from Inclusion Support came along on the night to share how she supports our educators to promote inclusive programs within our service. Just one of many outside agencies we connect with here at Little Ducks to support children’s learning and development. We have arranged for some local specialists to visit the service throughout the year to share their knowledge with the educators and children. Our most recent visits have been from Dr Grant at Method Dental and Chris from the Grange Li-brary. We have also been busy setting up connections between our ECTs and our local schools this year. Our early childhood teacher’s Miss Vicki, Miss Sirena and myself will be visiting St Columba’s Primary, Wilston State School and Windsor State School over the next month to visit the Prep classrooms and meet with the Prep teachers. This process of having open com-munication with our local schools is so important when it comes to transitioning our children from Kindergarten to Prep. We use these opportunities to ensure that our kindergarten pro-gram remains relevant and current in line with the expectations of Prep and also to share information about our program and children to better support them as they leave our play based curriculum to head to the more formalized primary education setting. We have invit-ed the schools to also visit us here at Little Ducks later in the year to help our children feel secure and comfortable when they get to Prep by being able to see a families face. We love involving our community and our families in our experiences here at Wilston. If you would like to contribute an opportunity of learning through your profession or connections please do not hesitate to come and see me and we discuss this further. Sincerely, Rebecca Bosher

169 Newmarket Road Wilston QLD 4051 Phone (07) 3356 8100 Fax (07) 3356 8400

wilston@littleducks.com.au

A note from your Centre Manager

Upcoming Events!

March

Friday 2nd – Clean Up Australia Day ‘Little Ducks Clean Up Day’– each

taking part in keeping our environ-

ment clean and beautiful. Wednesday 14th – Grange Library

Storytime 10:30am Story time provided by

Grange Library Friday 23rd – Earth Hour Little Ducks will go “electricity free

between 10am and 11am” to teach

children about being energy con-

scious. Thursday 29th – Easter Egg Hunt Celebrating the tradition of the East-

er Egg hunt celebrated in many

countries around the world. Come

along at 3:30pm to participate in the

Little Ducks egg hunt. Friday 30th – Good Friday PUBLIC HOLIDAY Monday 28th – Easter Monday PUBLIC HOLIDAY

April

Monday 2nd – Easter Monday PUBLIC HOLIDAY Monday 9th – Friday 20th – Hen-

ny Penny Hatching Watch the wonder of the lifecy-

cle happening in our very own

centre as we patiently wait for

the Henny penny eggs to

hatch into chicks. Wednesday 25th - ANZAC Day PUBLIC HOLIDAY Leading up to this day, we will

pay our respect to the diggers.

Policy Reviews

Educator Spotlight ... Veronica Creek—Educator in Preschool Miss Veronica has just moved to Brisbane from Home Hill just south of Townsville. Miss Veronica’s first impressions on joining our centre were how lovely and welcoming the educators were and how intelligent and full of fascinating conversation our children are. A big kid at heart Miss Veronica finds she has natural repoir with younger children and loves getting down to their level to share some fun and laughs together allowing her to bring out her inner child. Favourite colour: Purple Favourite food: Lasagne

Favourite Movie: Step Up

Favourite Book: The Cat in the Hat

We value your input and feedback ….. The policies/procedures in review during March and April are: Anaphylaxis Policy Maintenance Policy Ways that you can provide feedback are: Our policies are available to read in the foyer and you can give feedback in 2 ways, by email or anonymously via the suggestion box

Development information

Schemas of Play Have you watched your child push items off the coffee table for seemingly no reason only to push them off again as soon as they are picked up? Do you watch them tip their food or wa-ter onto the table during meal times and sigh with frustration? Or watch them wheel a toy car back and forth over and over mesmerised for long periods of time? If you ever wondered why, read on. These patterns of repeating behaviour can be organized into “schemas” of play. What is a schematic behaviour? Schema are building blocks for the brain. Children need time to explore things in a predicta-ble, repeated method, testing and experimenting with several objects in turn. This process forges connections in the brain and helps children begin to predict what make predictions. These repeated behaviours which can sometimes be frustrating or difficult to understand are normal developmental behaviour. Sometimes children will pursue their schema in ways that are challenging (like throwing things in an enclosed space, or climbing on the furniture) so it is helpful to have other ways to direct that “trajectory” urge or the “positioning” desire. Below is a brief description of schemas often explored by young children and a list of ex-periences that Support, Extend, and Re-Direct Schema Transporting. The process of picking things up and moving them to a new location and then moving them back again. They may use baskets, bags or trolleys to collect items and then move them around with them. To support this in a healthy way you could provide games of gathering things in baskets, boxes or bags. Play in the bath with floating toys and a boat or basket to load them into. Let them help with putting clothes into the washer and taking them out of the dryer. Provide plenty of baskets, bags, boxes, and wagons to move things around in. It may help to put the majority of your small toys away while a child is in this phase so they have fewer total items to clutter the house with. Trajectory. Throwing, pushing, kicking items or knocking things over to explore how things move through the air. Seen regularly in between the ages of 6months and 3years. Try blow-ing bubbles, or waving feathers or scarves through the air. Set up a game of ring toss or shoot soft objects into baskets. Embrace meal times for the messy learning experience they are. It may help to put away many of your breakable valuables while your child is in this phase. Rotation. If your child loves cars, trains, and anything with wheels, and also loves to spin around, they enjoy rotation. Provide options for unscrewing lids from empty water bottles or plastic jars, playing with water wheels, spinning things dry in a salad spinner, playing with hula hoops, and drawing circles. These children may like playing with volume knobs or other knobs, so think about whether there’s anything you need to childproof. They also may like taking lids off containers, they may even figure out “child-proof” containers, so make sure medicines and chemicals are out of reach.

Development information

Enclosure and Enveloping. The urge to hide or bury things including themselves in or under anything; blankets, the dryer, beds, buried in the sand put. To practice these enclosure skills in a safe way try to save large boxes for them to hide in and to pack things in, set up tunnels, set up a tent to sleep inside, play with a parachute, save small boxes to hide things in. Play lots of peek-a-book or hide and seek. Children exploring the enclosure schema often hide objects, so be careful not to leave essential items (like car keys!) in their reach. Disconnecting. The phase of destroying things: knocking down block towers, scattering Legos, tearing apart books. Some ways to support this schema and keep your sanity. Give them a bin full of paper they’re allowed to tear apart, try to re-frame your way of playing with blocks – know that it’s all about building something that they will enjoy knocking down. Now is a good time to put away toys with lots of small parts and read those beloved books together under supervision. Position. Creating a sense of order for example by lining things or collecting things in sets. and believing that everything has a proper place. Try exploring number and letter magnets, counters, stacking cups, and shape sorters. Be ready to help support and guide the difficult emotions of upset and frustration when someone disrupts this sense of order. Orientation. That drive to put ourselves in different positions, ie: hanging upside down, turning their heads sideways, or climbing high to get a better look. Get outside and head to the park for some opportunities to climb, spin and swing. Explore some gymnastics sch as tumbling and rolling. Be ready for you child to climb on things not meant to be climbed on. Try to provide as many safe and appropriate climbing opportunities as possible and work towards teaching them that certain climbing is unsafe and could lead to injuries. It can be challenging , tiring and frustrating managing the actions that come from exploring these schemas. Remember at the end of the day that your little person is not seeking to frustrate you, they are growing their brain and organising their ways of thinking about the world by exploring this schema over and over again. Sources: https://gooddayswithkids.com/2014/09/30/schemas-of-play/ https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html https://www.pacey.org.uk/working-in-childcare/spotlight-on/schemas/

Nursery Natter! Our new year is well under way and we have lots of new friends in the Nursery Room. We extend a big welcome to all the children and their families. We hope you all have lots of fun and learning during your time with us here at Little Ducks Wilston. We have been fo-cussing on getting to know all of the children and their own unique qualities, characteris-tics and routines. We know that leaving your small child in childcare can at first be very unsettling for both the parents and their children. Our aim is to form a close bond with each child and their family to help make this transition as smooth and painless as possible. This means lots of quality one on one time with each child and lots of fun distractions in-cluding bubble blowing, balloons, music, singing, story books and puppets as well as many more…

When the children feel happy, safe and secure they are then able to move on and learn new things.

The children in the room are of different ages and are at different lev-els of development. Our younger friends are enjoying lots of tummy time on a variety of different textured mats. Tummy time is really im-portant for young babies as it helps to develop head, neck and upper body strength ready for when your child starts crawling. Others have recently discovered the joys of commando crawling. We are working with these children to give them lots of time to practice their new skills while assisting them to learn traditional crawling movements.

Several of the Nursery children who are quite proficient at crawling have decided it’s time to move onward and upward and try to pull themselves up to a standing position. With this in mind, we have provided a range of experiences to encourage this important gross mo-tor skill. Children have been observed pulling themselves up onto the furniture, tyres, the bridge outside, obstacle course, bead maze, chairs, shelves and even their teachers !

We have a holistic approach to learning and cover all developmental areas. These include physical, personal, social and emotional wellbeing as well as cognitive aspects of learning. We are teaching the children in our care how to sit, crawl, stand, feed themselves, social interactions, language skills and problem solving skills just to name a few. We do this through ‘play’ which makes learning fun for all of children. We are constantly talking to them and singing to them which helps them absorb all the words they need for language later on.

We value family input and recognise you are the child’s primary care-givers. We love to know what your child gets up to outside of the day care centre and welcome any photos, books, stories or suggestions.

Senior Nursery News! To begin the year, the children have taken an interest in our ani-mal and natural sensory corner, where we explore the different jungle and farm animals. The children have bonded over the love of animals and used this as a platform to get to know each other and develop friendship. We continue the children’s interest through introducing our ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear’ felt board, animal foot print paintings and through our parent input, we made a paper plate duck that the children thoroughly enjoyed creating.

The month of January saw us celebrate Australia Day where we learnt some Aboriginal songs such as Inanay and Taba Naba. We also began incorporating the Acknowledgement of the Land in our routine to help children understand the diversity of Australian culture. Some of our families had a nice time in the beach, which lead us to read the book Australia in the Beach. Whilst reading this book, we discussed the unique Australian weather and the im-portance of following sun safety guidelines every day. We also celebrate Waitangi Day by

learning the colours of the Tino Rangatiratanga Flag and the in-troduced the Maori colour song. The Chinese New Year is also a wonderful event for the children to celebrate as we listened to Chinese nursery rhymes, ate some fortune cookies and greeted each other, “Kung Hei Fat Choi.” These cultural celebrations gave children insights of the connection, similarities and differences between people.

We were also fortunate to have the Ocean Life Learning come to Little Ducks. This gave the children many opportunities to interact with different sea creatures and learn how to handle them with care. To develop the children’s care for the environment we read the book Fish finds a Home and discussed the importance of throwing our rubbish in the bin.

Through all these activities the children’s sense of agency and belonging are flourishing. They are showing interest in learning who their peers are and their names whilst constructing their own identity within the context of their families and the Little Ducks community. The children are also beginning to demonstrate their developing ability and interest as we intro-duced different sensory activities, different trajectory schemas and simple yoga poses to re-lax and reflect after a very busy day of creative play!

Next month, we will continue to extend our sensory activities to help children develop positive dispositions for learning. We will continue to work on helping children develop sense of owner-ship in their environment by encouraging them to participate in decision making, routines and transitions. Along with these we will assist the children to develop independence, sustain pro-ductive relationship with other children, learn their names and extend language development through songs, books and sus-tained conversation.

Toddler Tales! Hello and welcome from the Toddler room. Wow what a busy first start to the year it has been. We have always had some form of project or investigation ongoing within the room. Throughout the month of January and February we explore the cause and effect of floating and sinking with the children. The budding scientist led our investiga-tion as we explored objects that floated and sank. Togeth-er as it quickly escalated we made a sensory bottle with small pebbles and yoghurt caps ( boats) as the children

referred to them. We have been able too achieve our goals thus far in the room of helping children settle in and send their families off for the day with smile. We have been focusing on some big ambitions in our first half of year as many of our friends have takin on the task of toileting. With help from the families and their fellow peers already so many of them have been able to succeed. Well done! We are currently teaching the children the process and steps of getting dress inde-pendently and putting on their pants. We have been able to witness many of the children helping each other with this process and cheer-ing each other on. Please remember a few important details – please continue with the journey - please dress your child in appro-priate toileting clothing,- ensure your child has plenty of spare cloth-ing. This is a enjoyable process so please continue to use lots of positive praise and rewards. While we travel together on this learning journey we can celebrate the wonderful milestone.

While we love to play inside we also have seen so many of the children explore large gross motor skills and hand eye coordi-nation skills. We have been able to clearly see the children thinking about the messages from the brain through to the legs, arms and other parts of their bodies. While the confi-dence has been building we continue to support them by setting up more exciting challenges on a daily basis. One of the favourites at the moment is jumping off a large a frame on to the pillow. Manoeuvring the bicycle steps. Conquering hop-ping, jumping while we sing “ hop little bunnies” which has been a extension from our move and groove program. Both Susie and I believe in the children having ownership over their belongings. You will have noticed the children’s new lockers being pictures of them a pose to their names. I have noticed

the children beginning to take more care of their belongings while they find their own indi-vidual picture and place there items of clothing, shoes and back packs in the allocated lock-er. What a wonderful way for them to feel connected and have a sense of identity in the room. e will continue to look forward to sharing your child’s learning journey with you in the coming months.

Junior Kindy Catch Up! “Bon jour” (Hello in French) Welcome to another Junior Kindy catch up. We would like to start off by welcoming our new friends Jasleen, Camillo and Augustus to the Kindy environment, we are very excited to be apart of your learning journey and look forward to working in partnership with all our kindy families and building trusting relationships in 2018.

As we get to know the children more and learn about their current interest, we have been lucky enough to pro-vide some wonderful and engaging learning experience from parent input. We have explored the children’s cul-tural backgrounds and developed a sense of understand-ing and respect for cultural diversity, opening the door for opportunities of learning through language. Each morning we invite the children to choose a new language from around the world to greet our friends and acknowledge diversity in our community. During the month of Febru-

ary, we have celebrated Chinese New Year with our kindy friends getting involved in the fes-tivities, exploring multi-cultural role play with dress ups, creative arts making lanterns and developing a sense of understanding and meaning of Chinese New Year with lots of discus-sions with the children during play. We encourage all families to be apart and contribute to their child’s learning and look forward to sharing all the wonderful things happening outside of Junior Kindy and incorporating that into our everyday experiences. This supports children to feel a sense of belonging and confidence self-identity within our environment. We have had a busy first few months here in the Junior Kindy getting to know each of the children observing their interest and watching their confidence and personalities emerge as their sense of belonging grows in their environment. So far this year we have

shared some wonderful experi-ences as the children express enthusiasm for developing their fine motor skills and the use of creative arts to express them-selves. With such a diverse bunch of children we have imple-mented changes to our environ-ment to meet the children’s needs with the addition of clay exploration, play dough and sensory messy play. Just re-cently we invested the importance of washing our hands and used messy play to highlight germs hidden in the slime. The children thoroughly enjoyed exploring the slime and collecting germs so much that they wanted to wash their hands to make them clean again. How cool is messy play when the children can learn the importance of personal

Junior Kindy Jumble! hygiene and the importance of washing our hands stop germs from making us sick, something we as Educators feel strongly about and will continue to implement and teach in our daily rou-tine. As our Little people getting stronger and grow each day, so do their needs for their new-found abilities. What better way to do this than in our very own outdoors with the children challenging their gross motor, upper body and large movement skills on the monkey bars and pulling themselves up over climbing frames and rope ladders. Educators have worked closely with children to help them work towards achieving their goals and celebrating in their achievements with them as they are taking risk and learn to navi-

gate their environment to strengthen their muscles and stay healthy in childcare. With so many experiences happening in and around our environment, Dramatic play and con-struction have always been a favourite in our room. The home corner space has seen many transformations as the children interest shift each week. The introduction of capes has led the way for some interesting play with the children using them to engage in dramatic play and storytelling. Our construction zone has been a busy place full of builders and engineers with the children finding different ways to use the wooden blocks. Just recently we transformed our room into a city filled with trains, wooden towers made from our clever Junior Kindy friends. If you have any building martials suitable for our construction zone such as pvc piping and old tools our little friends are beginning to show interest in real life tools and have been exploring the toy tools during play. Who knows we might have some builders and engineers in our mix. As we move forward this year we have continued to support children to become confident with managing self-help, this includes children working towards transitioning from nappies to undies, taking responsi-bility for their belongings and self-regulating their emotions. We want to thank all families for being patient and supporting educators with your child as they continue to go through these changes. We have al-ready seen progress with all our children and are excited to share all the great things that are in stall for us as we progress in the coming months. If you have any queries or would like to discuss anything about your child, please don’t hesi-tate to approach Miss Mel, Miss Selim or Miss Sarah either verbally, over the phone or through our centre email. Until next time, take care and we look forward to sharing with you all our learning journey.

Welcome Willow, Eloise and Jack, we look forward to lots of fun and learning together throughout the year. We are also excited to welcome Miss Veronica to our room. She will be working with Sirena on Thursdays and Fridays when Vicki is not in the room. She will be around the centre helping out in other rooms throughout the week so please make her feel welcome.

At the start of the year it is important for the children to gain a sense of belonging, security and trust in their new environment (identity), so we have been working on build-ing those respectful and caring relationships, not only child to child, but also with the educators and the classroom (connectedness). We have already found that the children are being very respectful to each other in both their play and in conversation, and we like to model this to the chil-dren so that it becomes a natural part of all interactions.

We have been super busy in the preschool room, working on becoming more independent as we look after our classroom and our belongings. We have wonderful new lockers which are big enough to fit all of our belongings, and we are really working on helping the children to be independent with caring for their belongings. You can help with this by getting your child to pack and unpack their items in the mornings and afternoons, as well as encouraging to find and put on their own things like shoes, hats, etc. This is an important part of the children building a sense of autonomy, delighting in making decisions, having a sense of agency and understanding that they can be capable and confident in all that they do.

Chess has been a wonderful experience that the children have been looking forward to every week. Ben, our chess coach, comes in each Monday afternoon to share amazing stories of King Sparky, his castle, treasure, horses and all the amazing fun they have together. The chil-dren take turns with four children in each session and we have already seen the children re-membering the different moves from the chess pieces as the maneuvers are woven into the stories Ben tells. This is such a great activity for the children to build positive dispositions and approaches toward learning (active learning) as they problem solve and apply and reflect on learning.

The children had a great time making pizzas at the beginning of February. After some parent feedback on children having the opportunity to cook, have shared dining experiences and trying new foods, we decided to have a pizza day. On the days leading up to making pizzas, we looked at pizza cook books, read stories about helping to cook at home, made a list of the ingredients and even shopped for the foods we would need on the Coles online shopping website. The children were definitely the leaders of this cooking exercise, as we encouraged lots of conversation and learning around food choices, stepping out of our comfort zone to try new foods, health and safety around cleaning hands, being safe around kitchen utensils and appliances, following recipes and instructions as well as similar experiences that the chil-dren have had.

Kindy Catch Up!

On 9th of February, the kindergarteners had a visit from Ocean Life Education, the children got to touch and see sea stars, sea urchins, sea cumbers, a 1 year old shark along with the egg it hatched from and a turtle. This experience allowed the children to practice being re-spectful to the animals and environments the children enter (live in), learn to care for the world we live in; as well as being active contributors to their world. The following week we got to make our very own preschool ocean, creating beautiful pieces of art to display on our ocean wall.

Some of our children have shown interest in our home corner and the wonderful collection of dress up clothes we have. Currently we have our community helper outfits in our home corner, including police, fire fight-ers and doctors. Seeing the children dress in these outfits daily has lead activities to further these interests and occupations. This experience has also allowed new relationships between different children to form and grow, as the children bond over their shared interest in our community helpers.

With the kindergarteners ever increasing interest in information com-munication technologies, we have introduced a fun new activity over the past few days called BeeBots. These amazing little creatures are helping us learn directional language, design and plan routes for our BeeBots to travel on, communicate with our peers and begin to explore the world of computer programming. We look forward to using the BeeBots more in-depth as we continue to explore our fun new toys.

With our wellbeing being a top priority for us, we have been working on the children’s fine motor skills such as cutting, threading, pencil grip, peg play and small part play. At this stage in the children’s development, it is important for the children to develop and gain strength in the small muscles in their hands so that when they are ready, they will see success in activi-ties such as writing. The children are also developing their whole body gross motor skills, participating in activities such as tumbling, cart wheels and skipping. With each new activity we work on building our movement control, coordination, strength and gaining the confi-dence to engage in new movement challenges.

Vicki and Sirena both teach with the holistic mindset, paying attention to children's physical, personal, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing as well as cognitive aspects of learn-ing, as we believe that all of these aspects paly a vital role in the development of young children. Please feel free to come in and chat at any time, or make an appointment if you would like to have a more in depth conversation about anything. Please remember that we love family and parent input in our program, we look forward to your input and suggestions throughout the coming months.

Kindy Catch Up!

Our Community ...

Sustainability Corner! An update from Miss Emily our Sustainability Officer Saturday 24th March is Earth Hour! Here at Little Ducks we will be going electricity free on Friday 23rd of March for Earth Hour. We will be talking with the children about conserving energy to create a more sustainable world. You can follow through with this at home by engaging in Earth Hour on Saturday and re-flecting on what your child hasn’t learnt here at Little Ducks on the Friday. We are also looking forward to celebrating National Wildlife Day soon. You can celebrate too by going outside and appreciating the birds and night animals that share our back-yards with us. Here at Little Ducks we will be talking about the different types of wildlife we commonly see here in Australia and how can play a part in keeping their environ-ments clean, tidy and healthy by putting our rubbish in the bin, reusing items where pos-sible and maintaining trees and shrubby to promote habitat growth. We’ve already start-ed by teaching the children about why it is important not to pull leaves off the trees.

Powerkids: Little Artists at Play. Every Tuesday, from 9am – 12pm. Cost is FREE. Brisbane Powerhouse Suitable for Brisbane Kids aged 0 – 5 years, takes place on the Tur-bine Platform and features the WeBe Robot Lab with theatre maker and performer Rob-bie O’Brien, where it’s all about working together to design and play with your robot selves. Surrounded by props and creative play stations, children are encouraged to let their imagination run wild. A Night at the Museum @ Queensland Museum March 24. 2018 from 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm This events is being held on the 24th March from 5.30pm – 8.30pm. Cost is $21 per adult, $15 per child (3-15 years), $60 per family (2 adults and 2 kids) and kids under 3 are FREE. BOOKINGS ARE REQUIRED. Queensland Museum after it closed to the public for a special night of museum fun! The night will not only include access to the museum exhibits after it closes, but there will be lots of hands on activities, demonstrations and pop-up shows. As this event is being held during the World Science Festival, you can expect to get hands-on with whacky science experiments, join in live music sing-a-longs, boogie down at the Museum disco; plus plenty more. Your ticket will also include entry into the Egyptian Mummies: Exploring Ancient Lives on the night.

Healthy Habits!