Smith Street News

Little Room Report

Half way through the year and into winter sees the little room busy with events.
In line with the EYLF curriculum we have been arranging excursions and events to coincide with the children‘s interests, with the intent to engage and teach.
For mother‘s day we cooked Mars Bar slice, following on from the children‘s interest in the cooking utensils set up in the sand pit. Here the children were able to learn measurements, fine motor and social skills, as well as being introduced to the cooking process.

Fairy dress ups and princess gowns became very popular in our home corner, inspiring revelry in the form of a Fairy/Pirate/Peter Pan/Princess party. Family were invited to join in the day; with face painting, fairy bread making, dancing and playing in the sets with their costumed children. The day provided an outlet for the children‘s creative side, as well as an opportunity to simply have fun.

The book "Postie" was the catalyst for the little rooms
exploration of the postal system. A post box, letters and stamps were incorporated into the home corner Time was set aside for each of the children to 'write' a letter to themselves or family. The three year olds will be going on a small excursion to the local post box to mail their letters home. This experience introduces the children to an aspect of their community, and will hopefully encourage thought on the process that saw the letters reach them at home.

Big Room Report

Our big room has been undergoing many changes over the past few months and we are excited to see the children settled in and exploring their environment with enthusiasm. One of the most exciting things for the children has been the arrival of many new resources. A big thanks to the parent committee for their hard fundraising efforts to enable us to purchase these new resources for the children. These new resources have provided many hours of exploration, investigation and fun for the children. Included in the resources were some new duplo sets – which have been and still remain particular favourites for many of the children! We all love our new book stand too, where the children can easily select the book of their choice and return it safely to the shelf when finished.
Another interest which we delved into was the 'dinosaur world' project. This began with one of the children bringing in a newspaper article about dinosaurs and culminated in all the children being involved in creating our very own dinosaur world. The dinosaur world was made in a large box, which the children had all worked together to paint. Added to this were trees, bark, a river, rocks and of course, dinosaurs. The project ran over several weeks, and incorporated a range of curriculum areas – creative arts, language and literacy, social play and physical play (fine motor development)
In the outdoor environment, we are noticing how much the children like to run. This has been causing some accidents with children bumping into each other or falling over. To overcome this problem but still allowing for the children to have space to run, the staff and children came up with some new guidelines on safe areas to run. So now in our yard, we have an 'active area' where running is allowed and 'walking areas' where it is not safe to run. The children have responded well to these new guidelines and hopefully this will cut down on accidents.
Some other ongoing interests in the big room include the family tree. We are still encouraging anyone who hasn‘t brought in a family photo to do so, to add to our family tree. The children love to look at the photos of their families and to show their friends. The family tree will remain on display for a while yet, so please bring in those family snapshots.
Also, you may have noticed a range of national flags being displayed in our room. This has come about through a uni assignment that Toni was doing regarding how diversity is shown in our centre. From this, the staff decided that it we would like to display all the cultures of our staff and families from the centre – look for the flag from your culture and talk to your children about it. Any feedback is welcomed from families.
Have you noticed our new tables and chairs?? They look fabulous don‘t they? We were very excited to receive our new, more natural looking tables and chairs, which fit better into our environment. The children were very excited about all those boxes and packaging that they all came in – they were put to very good use!
That‘s all for now. As always if you have any feedback or enquiries, please do not hesitate to speak to any of the staff in the big room.
Big Room Staff