September at Minischool Educational preschool Norfolk
Island.
"My
life should be filled with wonder, discoveries, and adventure. Take me outside.
Let me get to know and love nature. I will remind you what it's like to see
with a child's eyes and open heart." Let's go outside and play on the
natural preschool playground!
September seems to have been merged in to the recently
departed August.
Followed hot on the heels by October, but first we had
better go back to all the events and daily adventures that make Minischool so fresh
and inspiring for myself and the pre-schoolers.
Starting off with Father’s day, the children painted some
very special pictures for their daddies. And then wrote down all of the reasons
we love them so much.
While we were enjoying the strawberries, snow peas, cherry tomatoes
and oranges in our garden and watching it growing bigger, we embraced the
spring theme in our butterfly corner garden waiting for the first monarch
caterpillar to appear on the plants specifically for them. Our worm café keeps
us interested watching them devour all sorts of natural products from paper to
eggshells. The worms give us great worm juice to put back into the garden so we
are grateful to them. Our giant sunflowers are fascinating especially when the
bees visit or a smiley face appears in the disk florets (center part of the
sunflower). We are looking forward to seed saving these giants to share among
our families, so everyone can have some to grow & enjoy.
Thank you to Admin for grading Prince Phillip drive, the
roadwork equipment kept our boys (and the girls) entertained in its various
stages of completion. I think our favourite was the rumbling grumbling roller
that flattened the road and made us vibrate while standing on the side, it was
almost like and earthquake one 4 year old commented.
When the road was completed, we headed for a picnic morning
tea down the hill at Cockpit waterfall to read a story on the footbridge
followed by some gutsy grass hill running. We are still unsuccessful in finding
any geocaches that are reported to be in that area. I am hoping that if any
locals can help us with finding geocaches on the island, could they please
contact us as we would love to be involved in possibly hiding some in the
future as well.
At the Athletics
carnival we made pom poms in our team colours and headed to the school oval to
support our brothers, sisters, friends and former Montessori Kinderhaus pupils.
It was fun to watch them racing and gave more encouragement to our children who
are commencing kindergarten in 2014. The hit of the day though wasn’t the lolly
scramble; it was the school playground slide!
Our school holidays gave us some extra pre-schoolers and
‘helpers’ while having time off from their school. This was a good opportunity
to have an emergency services week. We did our preschool homework learning the
correct numbers to call in case of an emergency and enjoyed the role play of
acting our different scenes.
The fun part was the visit to the Emergency services shed
and the ride on the fire engines up and down the runway. We loved the uniforms
and learning to stop drop and roll if on fire. Our local firemen were so
awesome I am sure everyone went home and begged their parents to work on an
evacuation plan for their house.
A few days later we visited the Norfolk Island Police
station with our specially self-made constable badges and spent time in the
jail cell. I think a few of our children had a bit too much fun in there
dancing to the cameras and in the back of the paddy wagon. Thanks to our local
police, especially Shaun and Tim for spoiling the minischoolers.
We had a great
time (not sure if we were meant to have that much fun)
J Back at preschool, the 5 year old forensic
team were fingerprinting all the children for their scrapbooks. Great work
everyone.
We did manage to fit lots of preschool work in. There was
writing letters and numbers, math equations, blended sounds, mapping and
geography puzzles and so much more.
September was a busy month for birthdays too. We managed to
celebrate 4 times by making our own cakes (mine was rainbow!) having a dance
party, making a group card and party games.
In the middle of the month we celebrated dress like a pirate
day as a fundraiser for childhood cancer. All of our children and staff dressed
for the occasion at the school library as we found plenty of books to help us
‘yo-ho-ho’ and ‘ahoy there me hearties’ for the day. Thanks to all of our
families for donating a gold dubloon or two to this worthwhile cause.
Minischool thanks its families for the support throughout
the year.
We are constantly striving to make every day learning fun
and encouraging while we learn about ourselves, our place in the community and
the world we live in.
♥Cristina
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