MUD, MUD, MUD! Our mud kitchen is a very busy play area with so much exploration, creativity and messy mucky fun. Our children enjoy driving the great big trucks in the muck and creating busy road constructions as well as making sand cakes and mud pies, fixing drains and pipes and creating muddy lava pools. Such endless fun and opportunities for learning.
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We are excited to have lots of yummy vegetables ready to pick and eat from our garden. We have enjoyed trying cucumbers, radishes and tomatoes and have collected the seeds to plant again later in the year. As part of our Chinese New Year celebrations one of our families taught us some Chinese words and a "Happy New Year" song. Our Beachcomber vegetable garden is in need of some new plants. After lots of discussions with children about what we should plant a small group headed off to Palmers Garden Centre to buy seeds and seedlings. When we got there we noticed lots of different types of plants and lots of different smells from the flowers. Each of us had a card with the name of a vegetable we needed to find. We helped each other and looked at the letters on the card to find what we needed. Into our shopping baskets went the plants and seed packets. We soon headed back to kindergarten and showed our friends what we had bought. Over the next week we worked busily to prepare and plant our vegetable garden. A few weeks later we were very lucky to receive a donation of lots of strawberry plants from our local Bunnings store, we got busy planting them into our colourful barrels. Everyone chose a plant and waited for their turn to plant it. We noticed that some of the plants had white flowers and some even had little strawberries on them. As they were being planted we could see all the roots in the soil. We are excited about watching our garden grow over the nest few months. Early on a Monday morning, Jo from Living Eggs delivered hens eggs, an incubator and a brooder. We carefully placed the eggs into the incubator and turned the heater on. The incubator heat was set at 37.7 degrees celcius, just the right temperature to keep the eggs warm enough for chicks to hatch. Over the next 3 days children, parents and teachers were fascinated as they watched chicks hatch out of the eggs. When they began to hatch we could hear the chicks chirping inside the egg. Then came a tapping sound from inside the egg. That was the chick's beak tapping on the shell to crack open, this is called pipping. When a chick hatches, it needs to stay in the warm incubator to dry it's feathers as they are wet when they are born. Once the chick's feathers are dry after hatching, they can then be moved into the brooder. This is a bigger box with a light bulb as a heater, water and feed. The chicks sleep under the light bulb to keep warm. Every day the brooder is cleaned. We replenish the newspaper, sawdust, water and feed. Every day we could see the chicks growing, getting bigger and getting louder as they chirped for food. The children named the chicks - 'Wriggly, Pop & Hop, Fight, Ruby, Walkie and Popsicle'. Some children were keen to hold the chicks, a very special moment. We incorporated games, stories and art activities during this special time. A wonderful learning experience for everyone. Celebrating Fathers Day has become a tradition here at Beachcomber Kindergarten. We invite Grandads, Dads and their children to come along to kindergarten in the evening to enjoy dinner together and play. Here are some photo's of the evening. Matariki is the name of the Māori New Year and is also the name of the star cluster known as Pleiades, The Seven Sisters. Matariki is traditionally a time for remembering the past by telling stories (korero), for harvesting crops, sharing food (kai) with friends and whanau, and for planning for the future. At Beachcomber we enjoy celebrating Matariki through singing songs (waiata), making artwork, kites and weaving, retelling legends and stories, picking and eating mandarins from our tree, planting in the garden and coming together to share breakfast with our friends and whanau. This year we also had lots of fun shaking cream in a jar to make butter, which we spread onto our toast at breakfast time. This year we celebrated Mothers Day at by inviting Mums, Aunties, and Grandmas in to kindergarten to join us for a shared morning tea. Teachers, children and families dressed up for the special occassion. A time to come together and share this celebration. Christine's passion for teaching is evident in her business which she has owned and managed for many years. Christine's extended family has grown in recent years with four grandchildren to spend time with now. Early in 2018, Christine made the decision to step back from the day to day running of the kindergarten and hand over the operational side of the business to Theresa and Karen. Christine calls in to the kindergarten on a regular basis, with two of her grandchildren attending. We wish you all the best in your retirement years Christine.  In term 1 the Education Review Office visited our centre and reviewed our service. Over two days, they looked in-depth into our centre programme, management, internal evaluation, teacher/child/parent interactions and relationships, and more.
We came away with a good feeling from their two day review and when the official report was published on the Ministry of Education website, we were very please with the document. Here is the link:www.ero.govt.nz/review-reports/beachcomber-kindergarten-09-05-2018/ |
AuthorKaren Harris Archives
January 2020
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