Room Leaders

Sarah: Full-time (Monday - Friday)

Kristen: Full-time (Monday - Friday)

Assistant Educators

Hannah: Full-time (Monday - Friday)

Leanne: Part-time (Monday & Tuesday)

Rupal: Casual

Agnes: Casual

Toddler Reflection w/e 14th August 2015 Welcome We would like to give a warm welcome to Tanisi and Lucy who have come up from the babies room, also welcome to our new arrivals; Amaaya and Teju, who are already beginning to settle in nicely and enjoy all the fun we have in the toddler room.

Moving up Good luck to Vincy-Louise, Matilda, Kiaan and Daniel have moved up to the Kinder Room to further learn, explore and develop.

Farewell We are very sad to have said farewell to Miles. We will all miss him and hope he comes and visits again soon.

REMINDERS: Please ensure that your children’s belongings are clearly labelled, our lost

property box continues to fill up and is they are not claimed we will not take responsibility for these belongings when they are given away.

We have noticed that we are needing to supply a lot of spare water bot-tles to the children, please ensure to bring a clearly labelled water bot-tle in for your child every day they are in care, and take them home to be washed at the end of the day.

As we are well into the colder months of the year and the ground does get pretty wet, please bring your child in with the appropriate clothing, espe-cially; jackets and closed shoes. On the topic of clothes, as we all know the children love to get messy and do sometimes have accident, please bring in spare clothes , as they are needed.

We have noticed that we are running out of nappies before children are being picked up. Please ensure to bring between 3-5 nappies every day your child is in as we don’t always have spare nappies for your children.

Our Toddler Garden has slowly begun to accumulate, thanks to all the families who have already brought in a family photo. For the families who have yet to bring one in, please do so when you get the chance, they mean a lot more to your children then you realise.

Shop

As part of the children’s interest we worked together to cre-ate a shop. Our shop contained a shelf of recycled packag-ing i.e. cereal, tea, Gatorade, yoghurt, milk, cups, plates etc. a table with a cash register, pretend money, shopping bags and aprons.

The children were very excited to use the shop and put their role playing and dramatic skills into practice.

By transferring and adapting what they have learnt from one context to an-other the children were able to play and interact with each other based on what they have seen when going shopping with their families and/or friends.

They showed good verbal and non-verbal skills when commu-nicating between one another and in that ensuring they are using their manners, being respectful and caring towards each other. The children are developing their emerging autonomy, inter-dependence, resilience and knowledgeable and confident self-identities.

The children are developing dispositions for learning such as curiosity, cooperation, enthusiasm and imagination through this experience. As you can see the children are learning so much in such a simple experience. And from this experience we intend on ex-

tending on their learning and de-velopment.

STOP, DROP AND ROLL…… COOL AND CALL!

On the last day, using all the information they had accumulated, we did a surprise fire evacuation. The staff dra-matically played out the situation that there was a fire in the kitchen and begun blowing the whistle. The children

responded promptly and excitedly and quickly walked over to the door and waited for a staff member to hand them the rope from the evacuation bag. The children followed every instruction in our pretend fire evacuation as

they walked outside and sat down and waited for their names to be called out.

The children did such a good job remembering and following all instructions they were given and helped each other out to complete the activity.

We are continuing to teach the chil-dren our fire evacuation procedure.

Using the computer at group time we showed the children pictures of fire and fire trucks. We discussed why we don’t touch fire and what happens when the fire trucks come. We showed them how to call ‘000’ in an emergency and using the com-puter again the children watched an educational song called

‘Stop, Drop and Roll’

The following day we showed the children our fire evacuation bag and the content of that bag and also al-lowed then to hear our fire evacua-tion whistle. We demonstrated to the children what they need to do when they hear the whis-tle and al-lowed them to do it as well.

Fire Evacuation

Not only does this duo perform at childcare centres, they also do play groups, kindergartens, birthday parties and festivals. If anyone is inter-ested, want to know more information or would like to make a booking;

Management: 0433 262 218

Bop (Brian): 0439 524 924

Billie: 0430 049 696

Email: thebopalongs@hotmail.com

On Tuesday 11th the centre got a visit from a due that call themselves ‘The Bopalongs’. The Bopalongs are a fun, dynamic and colourful children’s performance due for kids of all ages. They combine not only all original songs, but both Bop and Billie have years of experience as entertainers, musicians, writers and vocalists.

The whole centre got together outside to watch and interact with the performance. The children loved all the original songs and mimicked everything Bop and Billie did.

The children learnt about different types of fruit from the song ‘In my fruit bowl’, make shapes with your fin-

gers while dancing to ‘Triangles in my lunch box’, they got ready with their rockets to blast off to the sky with ‘I’d rather rife in a rocket’ and went for a car ride in the rain with ‘The rainy day ride song’ and a few more in-teresting and entertaining songs.

The Bopalongs

Integrating Over the months the staff have been going to personal development semi-nars to not just help ourselves but also to further improve our practices and the way we do things at the centre. One of these seminars we have attended was about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and that lead into Sensory Proc-essing Disorder (SPD).

We have found this to be quite interesting; their strategies and practices, children’s behaviours, signs and symptoms, etc. Using all the information we have gathered we have decided to try and integrate all we have learnt into our own practices and daily routines at the centre.

This will take time to put into practice and encourage the children to follow these practices, but we are determined to achieve this so bare with us as we make these changes to improve ourselves and the centre and to further help ensure your children are learning and developing as best they can.

We have already begun to do some sensory activities with the children which is all part of working towards all the changes we are working towards.

Using playdough and small plastic insects the children were encouraged to search through the play dough to find the insects and name them. The chil-dren found it a little difficult, managing to separate the playdough to find the insects, but with a little help they were able to succeed

Another activity was making foam sand. The children hadn't seen or done this experience before so it was all new to them. The children helped to make the foam sand by simply mixing shaving foam and sand together. Afterward the children were given to opportunity to play with the foam sand and ex-plore everything it can do; moulding, building, mixing etc.

Autism facts:

Autism is a lifelong develop-mental condition that af-fects, among other things, the wat an individual relates to his or her environment and their interaction with other people.

The word ‘spectrum’ de-scribes the range of difficul-ties that people with autism may experience and the de-gree to which they may be affected.

The main areas of difficulty are in social communication, social interaction and re-stricted or repetitive behav-iours and interests.

People in the autism spec-trum may also have:

Unusual sensory inter-ests.

Sensory sensitivities.

Intellectual impairment or learning difficulties.

An estimated 1 in 100 people has autism; that’s almost 230,000 Australians. Autism affects almost 4 times as many boys than girls.

If your interested in more information go to this site; http://www.autismspectrum.org.au/

Or feel free to ask a member of staff