ROBOTS

During the October term break Chris and I attended, and presented at ULearn09 - a conference for educators at all levels in Christchurch. We had the opportunity to share our children's leaning with ECE, Primary and Secondary teachers and attended an interesting range of workshops. One of the things we came back to Kindergarten with was Lego 'WeDo' - a starter set for robotics - to use with the children. The children create a robot, following on screen instructions, and then programme the robot to follow a sequence of moves. This requires an extended period of focus on the part of the child to complete the task and we have been working in pairs to create our robots. The children who have been able to participate so far have been very excited with what they have achieved and are looking forward to more robotic adventures in the future.
Margaret

ICECREAM AND PAVLOVA

15 September 2009
We recently watched a slide show on Manaia Kindergarten's blog sharing how the children there had made ice cream. Our children thought that they would like to make ice cream too, so we emailed and asked for the recipe. Once we had the recipe in hand we set a date to create - 14th September. In the meantime we read a new story - 'The Little Blue Duck' which is about a little blue duck making a pavlova. This led to discussion about how much everyone loves pavlova, especially with ice cream, and so plans were made to make the pavlova to eat with the ice cream, especially as we had to wait overnight to eat our ice cream. We had a lot of helpers on both days (one for the ice cream, one for the pavlova) of creating our yummy snack and everyone was very pleased with the tasty results - they were SO delicious!
Margaret

OUR NEW GEOGYM

26 August 2009
Today Henry's dad Steve came to Kindergarten with his tools and put together, with lots of help from the children, our new Geogym. Our old white one kept breaking so we hope that our colourful new metal one will last a lot longer. Thank you so much Steve for helping us with building our Geogym, we will get a lot of use from it. As soon as the children saw it completed they couldn't wait to start climbing, swinging and balancing.
Margaret

SNOW PLANET 09

Wow, what a great time we had in the snow! We went to Snow Planet on the bus and had a lovely picnic in the sun before we went in. Everybody got a stamp on their hand as we went through into the entrance to the snow area and after putting on our warm clothes we grabbed a toboggan and got ready to have fun. We either used the magic carpet or walked up to the top of the slope and then zoomed down. As Callum said, "awesome, that was so fun" when he got to the bottom. Lots of our grown ups (including the teachers) had fun zooming down too and some of them even had races. After we had finished our fun in the snow we went into the cafe to have a yummy lunch before going back to Kindergarten. What a great day out we had
Margaret

DISCO 2009

Wow, how much FUN did we have? On Friday night, 31st July, after packing all the furniture out of the way, we had our Annual Disco. Jan-Peter came along with his DJ gear including a very cool bubble machine and fancy lights, and played lots of great dancing music for us. Outside Marko and Ollie D's dads manned the Barbeque so we could eat and have enough energy to last all night. On Monday we asked everyone what was their favourite part of the disco and their answers were -

❀ Eating sausages and having a drink
❀ Slipping/skidding on the floor
❀ Playing and the fizzy drink
❀ Running around outside
❀ Dancing
❀ Mummy taking photos of me dancing
❀ Dancing with Daddy
❀ Limbo Rock
❀ Dancing with my Mum
❀ Throwing my light stick
❀ Popping the bubbles

Everyone, including the grown ups had a great time and lots of people helped to tidy up at the end making it all a huge success.
Margaret

PLAYBALL SESSION WITH COACH CLARKE

23/07/09
Today we had a wonderful session with Clarke Osborne from PLAYBALL. Playball is a program developed by a sport coach in a sport environment, 20 years ago. The content of the program encompasses sport, movement and life skills. Basic skills and sport techniques are taught, providing children with an age-specific movement program. Children develop basic motor skills before they are able to tackle specialised sport skills. Focus in early childhood ages are on strongly improving motor development (muscle tone, dominancy - this needs to be discovered before any child can learn - bilateral symmetry and mid-line crossing) and fine and gross motor coordination, eye/foot/hand coordination. body balance, timing, directionality, spacial orientation and motor planning. Playball is a positive, unintimidating and non-competitive environment where results are achieved while having fun. The children are taught in a holistic manner - looking at the whole child. This is the same philosophy of kindergarten teaching. The life skills children learn include independence, cooperation, leadership, sportsmanship, communication, social respect, positive relationships and flexibility. The photos demonstrate the enjoyment of the children as they participated in a 35 minute session either with Coach Clarke or Coach Lou. The children's delight and enthusiasm as they participated in this program was evident for the entire playball session they engaged in and afterwards, they were so excited they were 'buzzing' around the kindergarten. Huge conversations about what they had just experienced and comments about how 'FUN' it had been, abounded. Thanks Clarke for contacting us and providing us with this free session for all of our children here at Greenhithe Kindergarten.
Chris :-)

SHAUN THE LAMB VISITS

22/7/09
We were so lucky today because Sophie and her mum Hannah brought their pet black lamb 'Shaun' along to Kindergarten for us to meet. We were able to feel his soft coat and some children were able to give him his bottle of milk - he was very hungry! After Shaun had finished his drink he went outside so we could see more of him. Sophie and Hannah kindly brought Shaun along to both sessions so all our children could meet him.
Thank you very much Sophie and Hannah.
Margaret

OUR NEW BIRD CINDY

We are so lucky because we have a very friendly cockatiel called 'Cindy' who loves to spend lots of her time with people. She sits on our shoulders as we walk around and loves to watch us doing our work.
Welcome to Greenhithe Kindergarten Cindy.
Margaret

MARKO DOES ANIMATION

Marko has made a really cool movie using the animation software called 'I Can Animate.' He placed a cut out of himself dressed in his Superman suit onto a large piece of blue paper - he chose it to be the sky. Each time he moved his figure on the paper, using blu tack, he took some photos. By the time he had finished his movie he had taken 126 photos. Marko chose the title for his movie, the music and the sound effect. At the end of session mat time he shared his movie with all the children and they really enjoyed watching it. Well done Marko what fantastic work!
Margaret

WE WENT TO KELLY TARLTONS

As an extension from the Red Sock Day the children were still really interested about sharks and sea life. So on the 15th May we decided to visit Kelly Tarlton’s. What a fantastic trip we had. We saw sharks,stingrays,fish and of course the cheeky penguins. After that we went to Bastion Point for lunch where some children rolled down the banks and climbed the fabulous trees that are situated there.
We were so lucky with the weather it was a glorious day. Lots of fun had by all.
Brenda

BUTTERFLY CREEK VISIT

Our children are currently very engaged in the life cycle of the Monarch Butterfly. We have been bringing caterpillars and swan plant branches for the caterpillars to eat inside every day and we are keeping them in our science area in a perspex animal house. We have also looked on You Tube to view the life cycle so we can see how the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis and how the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis because we can't always be there when it happens in real life. (Although some of us did get to see the caterpillar to chrysalis change on Monday afternoon. Weren't we lucky!)
Our morning children went to Butterfly Creek on Friday (20th February) to build on and extend this interest area. Unfortunately, it was a VERY wet day! The bus trip took a long time both ways because the traffic was very bad, but once we got there we had a great time. We went into the barn and saw and petted some of the animals and we saw fish in the aquarium area, spiders and other insects in an insect area and we just loved the butterflies. When we came out of the Butterfly House we were really lucky because the rain stopped long enough to go for a train ride before we had our lunch.