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Amy’s Message By Amy Goodlace, Principal

Dear Families, I have spent the past hour reading all the articles that have so carefully been written by the team and looking at the lovely photos that show happy, engaged children learning and exploring in their environment. For many, a new environment, and for others a new space in a familiar environment. I hope that you enjoy reading what all the stages have been doing over the next few pages. The children were introduced to their specialist teachers this week. As with everything we do at Reddam Early Learning School, it was a gentle introduction to a fantastic programme. As we so firmly believe in the importance of physical development for learning we have introduced physical education from our youngest group (The Nest) to our oldest group (Stage 4). Balance, posture and coordination is the fundamentals for learning success and at Reddam Early Learning School it is our aim to ensure that our children are able to reach their full potential by ensuring that these fundamentals are in place. Our physical education teacher is Spencer Clifton. Spencer worked with our stage 4

groups last year and we have asked him to continue with his fantastic work with all our children this year. The children in stage 3 and 4 have also been introduced to our Dance and Drama specialist lessons this past week. Laura has been working at Reddam Early Learning School for a few years encouraging the children to engage in dance and drama lessons exploring their creativity through movement, drama and music developing confidence which is a big part of the Reddam philosophy. We will be shortly be introducing our music specialist in the coming week to all our children from The Nest to Stage 4. We trust that you are as excited as we are in introducing the fantastic specialist lessons to extend the already rich programme developed for the children. Wishing all our families a very Happy Valentines Day and a Happy New Year to our Chinese community.

Warm Regards Amy

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Nest Developing Our Senses By Tatiana Botrel, Lois Ma, Marie Claire Cronin

In the Nest, a big part of our routine is dedicated to sensory activities. At this age it is very important to encourage children to take part in activities that involves their sighting, tasting, touching, hearing and smelling skills.

Sensory play supports language development, cognitive growth, fine and gross motor skills, problem solving and social interaction. It is also a great strategy for settling children who are feeling frustrated or angry.

In our classroom, the calming bottles and the marble game has been our main strategy to help settle the children during the first few weeks of school. The first activity is simply little plastic bottles filled with water, colour and lots of glitter. Once the children move the bottle they can see traces of glitter left in the water. The marble frame is another great resource, as the children get to watch the marble rolling down the colourful petal frame and the different

noises it makes as it goes down. We have also been exploring the little soft bunnies that go to sleep on their fluffy cotton bed. The children love touching the cotton and feeling its gentle texture on their skin.

Outdoors, the children have been very curious to see what they can do with the shaving cream on the glass frame. Oliver had fun touching the foam with his hands and excitedly showing his teachers the mess he was making. Isla on the other hand decided that she wanted to feel the shaving cream all over her head, hands and feet! Once the children started to observe their peers having so much fun, we could see the other children were very tempted to touch.

 

 

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Nest Developing Our Senses By Tatiana Botrel, Lois Ma, Marie Claire Cronin

The children have loved dancing to nursery rhymes and other songs in the nest. Sometimes we use the musical instruments, but the children’s favourite so far has been the scarves and ribbons. They have so much fun shaking them to the sound of the music and we also love playing peek-a-book, covering our faces with the coloured scarves.

This week, the children in The Nest explored finger paints for the first time. This technique was used to encourage the children to make a beautiful Valentine’s Day card for their families. Have you got yours?

As sensory play brings a lot of benefits to the children in this age group, we will focus on these kind of activities throughout the Term. All the families will soon receive a motivational letter that will explain what our provocation for this Term will be.

Sports Time, with Coach Spencer This week we introduced our new specialist class to the Nest. Coach Spencer will introduce sports to our little ones in a fun and play-based way. Sports classes will happen every Tuesday (9:15-9:45am) and Thursday (9-9:30am) in the Nest area.

 

 

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The Nest Photo Gallery

 

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The Nest Photo Gallery

 

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Fledglings Happy Chinese New Year By Hannah McCooey, Olivia Binions and Eva Loo

It has been wonderful being able to learn about Chinese New Year with the children. This was also a great way to promote cultural diversity in our classroom. It was very interesting for the children and the teachers to explore and respect the unique traditions that come with the Chinese New Year. We are in our class very lucky to have a beautiful book called ‘Lanterns and Firecrackers’ by Jonny Zucker and Jan Barger. This great book educated us on the traditions that take place in homes over the Chinese New Year. These traditions include, cleaning our homes and putting flowers everywhere, letting off firecrackers, hanging lanterns, buying some new clothes and getting together with our family and friends to have a great feast of food and drink. There is also a tradition of presenting red envelopes to family and friends which bear the significance of happiness. We all danced with a Dancing Chinese Lion puppet and sang the song about the ‘Chinese Dancing Lion’.

We talked about the different colours that we could see on the lion and straight away Abigail and Lilah said they could see “yellow” and “red”. We decided to do some artwork and make our very own dancing lions. We found a new way of painting. With the teachers help the children put a blob of yellow and red paint on the page and we folded the page in half. We used our hands to move the paint around the page and when we opened the page we had made our very own dancing lions because the colours had all mixed together to create great designs. Remy and Allira enjoyed getting their hands messy in the paint. We glued some googly eyes, and yellow, red and gold paper to our paintings creating beautiful masterpieces.

 

 

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Fledglings Happy Chinese New Year By Hannah McCooey, Olivia Binions and Eva Loo

Happy Valentines Day As we are approaching Valentines Day, The Fledglings wanted to share some love with our friends and families. We have been busy talking about love and what we do to show we love our friends. Otto says that he shows love by giving “kisses”. Charlotte told us that she shows love by giving “cuddles”. We asked the children if there anything else we can do to show love to our friends and Margarita mentioned “sharing”. There is definitely a lot of love in our classroom. The children got their hands messy when we started our artwork for Valentines Day. They got the choose how they wanted to do their paintings and having choices. The choices were, sponges, rollers or a paintbrush. The children were happy to learn different ways of painting. With a little bit of help the children sponged, rolled and painted over the heart and made their very own Valentines Day artwork. The Fledglings also collaborated with Stage 2 and Stage 3 to create a huge heart with all different techniques, which is on display in the Piazza.

We baked this week gathering all our ingredients together, and we were mixing and pouring, taking turns and creating our yummy krispie treats.

Physical Education Lessons We have physical education every Tuesday and Thursday morning for thirty minutes a session. We are delighted to introduce physical education lessons to The Fledglings Routine. We were amazed at how well the children interacted this week for their first session. It was very evident the children will enjoy this class. There was lots of physical activity including, stability which focused on the children’s core strength, balancing which focuses on observation and strength, crawling under objects and bending down and picking up. This bend down and pick up activity focused on colour grouping and recognition and allowing the children to change direction.

 

 

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Fledglings Photo Gallery

 

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Fledglings Photo Gallery Continued…

 

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Gung Hay Fat Choy- Happy New Year! By Daniella Gosty, Karla Cabezas, Monika Ranjitkar, Helen Wilson and Raquel Rachnitz

EYLF Outcome 2-2 : Children are connected with and contribute to their world.by responding to diversity with respect.

The children have helped some of our friends in the class celebrate Chinese New Year with the introduction of our Lion puppet and the song “See the Lion dance and prance”.

We have read the story ‘Lanterns and Firecrackers’ about how Chinese New Year is celebrated by cleaning the kitchen, putting on new clothes, receiving red envelopes with money, dancing with the lions and dragons, scaring the bad luck away with firecrackers and having a big feast of food. The children have all enjoyed having a turn at dancing the lion puppet on the strings as we sang the song and did the actions.

We decided to make our own lion and dragon in the atelier. We are making one for a wall display with paper plates and one for dancing using a tablecloth that we can stand under. We have looked at pictures of the dragons and lions and we chose to use colourful collage materials

with gold to decorate the body of the Lion. We plan to use a cardboard box for the lion’s head next week.

“See the Lion dance and prance

Dance and prance, dance and prance,

See the Lion dance and prance,

On Chinese New Years Day.

(Hear the drums go boom, boom, boom,

Hear the cymbals clash, clash, clash,

See the fireworks pop, pop, pop

See the children laugh and play,

On Chinese New Years Day”

Sports with Spencer

This week we had our first specialist class, sports with Spencer.

He introduced himself to us and we got to use hoops, bean bags and cones as part of the activities. These classes will be on a Wednesday and a Thursday each week. We will keep you updated on their progress.

 

 

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Stage 2 Photo Gallery

 

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Stage 2 Photo Gallery Continued …

 

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Stage 3 Are Nursery Rhymes Important? By Nina Bergel, Christina Mandalidis, Susan Casey and Deanne Jacobs

We are excited to share the new names of our groups in Stage 3. Following on from our interest in Australian animals the groups for the year are as follows:

Nina’s Group – The Wombats

Christina’s Group – The Kangaroos

Susan’s Group – The Koalas

Deanne’s Group – The Platypuses

The children are settling in as we are enjoying getting to know each other by enriching interests. As the children have enjoyed singing nursery rhymes we have decided to take this one step further. We provide props for the children so they can dramatize different characters. The focus this week was “Humpty Dumpty.” One of the children was given the job as narrator and each of the characters were encouraged to role play.

‘Listening comprehension precedes reading comprehension,” Mr. Stead said. In order for a child to understand what they are reading, they have to be able to hear the language first. A lot of the traditional

rhymes, such as ‘Jack and Jill’ and ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ are repetitious and allow for memorize basic structures and patterns in the English language. It’s important that children learn to memorize through verse.

We will continue to sing nursery rhymes daily as research shows that memorizing nursery rhymes lays the foundation for reading and listening comprehension (Tony Sted)

 

 

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Stage 3 Are Nursery Rhymes Important? By Nina Bergel, Christina Mandalidis, Susan Casey and Deanne Jacobs

Nursery rhymes and songs can be used anywhere at any time. As such, they are one of our most transportable forms of play. Here are some of the ways finger plays, rhymes, chants and songs, teach children concepts and skills and even provide emotional support –

Language Development

As children recite rhymes and sing songs, they are learning new vocabulary and how to articulate words, modulate their voices, and enunciate clearly. They are simultaneously practicing pitch, volume and voice inflection while experiencing the rhythm of language. They learn to pronounce words easily by saying them over and over again and by practicing them without effort or the pressures of criticism.

Reading Skills

In almost all finger plays, the hands move from left to right. This left-to-right directional motion is important for children to experience, since it prepares them for the order of the written word in English. (When you read to your children, let them follow your finger, tracing the words so they also absorb this concept from the written words in a book.) A second important reading concept that children must experience fully before they can become good readers is story sequence. They need to absorb how the sequence of what happened first, second, third, etc. and last affects the story so they can retell it in the order the events occurred.

 

 

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Stage 3 Are Nursery Rhymes Important? By Nina Bergel, Christina Mandalidis, Susan Casey and Deanne Jacobs

Maths Concepts

There is frequent use of counting in young children’s songs and rhymes, in both a forward and backward direction. Children learn to add as they count forward and subtract as they count backward. Other stories and songs explore words that describe size (“Billy Goats Gruff”) and weight (“The Three Bears”) and use math –related words to define concepts such as many, few, plenty, and so on. This contributes to the child’s basic math foundation, which will later help in math abstractions.

Creative Dramatization.

Rhymes and songs provide great building blocks for creative dramatics. Children love to act out the rhymes as they say them, dramatizing the actions of the characters with their whole bodies or using their hands and fingers. When children are encouraged by an adult to display their creativity in an atmosphere that is free from criticism, their sense of self

is strengthened and their confidence in expressing themselves is increased.

Comfort and Support

Nursery rhymes and songs are “places” young children can retreat to when they feel lonely, sad, or bewildered by their world. If a child is away from Mum or Dad and feeling alone, they can call upon a song they shared and be reminded of the times and the feelings they had when they sang it together.

Please enjoy singing along with your child as you hear them reciting these rhymes over the next few weeks and don’t be surprised if they start acting out some of the characters too.

Best wishes for the week ahead and please read your children’s love messages on display in the Piazza.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

 

 

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Stage 3 Gallery

 

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Stage 3 Gallery

 

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Stage 4 What’s On The Wall?! By Anita Martin, Kristina Rochi, Cheryl Freeman, Jane Pledger & Alissa Turini

It was just another ordinary day eating lunch in the back garden. Some children were enjoying a picnic on a mat and others were making the most of the new table settings delivered a few days prior.

The children must have been very hungry this particular day as it was uncharacteristically quiet as they were doing “more chomping than chatting”. You can imagine the surprise when one child, (who rarely misses anything) squealed, ‘What’s that on the wall?1”

Everyone’s eyes followed the line of Spencer’s arm who, was pointing excitedly at the stone wall. As one teacher investigated, she too became increasingly curious. On closer examination we could see that it had six legs, had strategic orange markings on its black body. This interesting and unfamiliar insect was carrying it’s dinner precariously to a hole purposefully created in the stone. The insect’s dinner was a full sized huntsman spider, slightly larger than itself.

It was an image that needed to be captured so, with this in mind, the teacher cautiously moved closer and closer continuing to take photos. The camera was as close as it could be when another insect, of the exact same type flew full pace attacking the teacher’s arm that was holding the camera.

Constant questioning from the children tuned into a loud squeal as onlookers experienced the unexpected. The teacher, whose camera went flying into the air as a result reminded the children to keep their distance. All decided that the hungry insect was best left alone as it continued carrying its dinner home.

From this, the children investigated and discovered the interesting yet cantankerous insect is called ………. We continued our research to learn what other types of insects might be living in our garden. Some children were interested in creating an insect identification chart which continues to be created, eventually being displayed in the garden for future reference.

 

 

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Stage 4 Gallery

 

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Dance & Drama By Laura Hudson

Stage 3 Objectives: The children will feel comfortable with their surroundings, realising that drama class is a place where they can learn how to sing, dance, and act.

Skills learnt this week: Concentrating and listening carefully

Following Direction

Activities include: Discussing where the audience space is and what an audience does, learnt how to bow, Action name game, sleeping animals, find similarities, follow the leader.

Stage 4 Objectives: Students w i l l demonst rate the understanding that theatre is the art of telling stories through acting and how observing the world around you is the first step to becoming a great actor

Skills learnt this week: Following Direction

Participating in a group discussion

Portraying Emotions

Activities include: Exploration: Discussing what is theatre? What makes a good actor?

The Mirror Activity/Quick change and Slow Motion Emotion Game

Discussing what an audience is and does, establishing where the audience space is in the room so they know where to sit when watching their peers perform.

 

 

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Physical Education By Spencer Clifton

Stage 2 The children entered the exercise area with big smiles and a great eagerness for sport. We started off with an introduction to the exercise area and surroundings followed by a warm up, that involved controlled sprint running to colour coded markers. The markers were placed in a specific way to encourage speed change, direction change, body weight transfer and spatial awareness.

Our second activity involved colour associated cues, bean bags and running. The children were given a bean bag each with a colour of a hoop called out and asked to find the hoop, once the correct hoop is found the children are to place the bean bag inside. The exercise was manipulated in a away to promote team work and communication with the children encouraged to help each other out.

Each activity builds on the core aspects for t h e f u n d a m e n t a l m o v e m e n t skills targeting core strength, stability, lateral movement and balance.

Stages 3 & 4 The children entered the court with great enthusiasm and excitement. We started off with an introduction to the court and

surroundings followed by a warm up, which involved controlled sprint running between different markers. The markers were placed in specific areas to encourage speed change, direction change and body weight transfer.

After a well deserved water break, we jumped into our next activity that involved a game called colour hoops. This exercise tested the children's situational awareness whilst using colour associated cues for running. The coloured hoops were scattered around the exercise area and the students had to be aware of others running around also looking for the nominated colours that were called out. This builds awareness of spatial proximity whilst being involved in sport and minimising injury in the future.

Our second activity for the lesson consisted of a game called "statues" that is built on the fundamental agility movements. The children are given the opportunity to run free in the exercise area, a whistle is blown with the children having to stop and freeze like a statue, a second whistle is blown to indicate movement again.