What did we do at Minischool in August 2013?

Hello everyone. Here is our August newsletter.

We kick started the month of August with a local farm tour. Thanks to Farmer Lou and Farmer Phil for allowing us to visit the Piggery. The part that the children most enjoyed was feeding broccoli to the pigs, sorting sizes from the biggest to the weeniest baby piglet, sampling the delicious bananas and calling to the Dorper sheep with their funny coats of wool. Along the drive back from Anson bay, we ticked off our checklists when we saw other farm animals along the roadside like geese, cows and calves, feral hens and roosters. We also stopped to sing happy birthday to the stable horses for their birthdays on the 1st of August. Thanks to Island eggs for their generous donation to the pre-schoolers. We put the eggs to good use during our cooking activities and studying the lifecycle of the chicken.

Back at preschool we continued on with the farm theme by making a scarecrow for our garden and mini scarecrows for our scrapbooks, writing farm inspired words and sentences, having a horse race using dice.

Using the purple cabbage from the garden, we amazed the children with an alkaline/acid science experiment which magically changed the colour of the purple juice. Details of this experiment are on our blog. The children have requested repeat performances many times since.

We enjoyed the warmer weather early in august and got to eat alfresco while enjoying the visiting rugby teams at Kingston. It was fun to cheer on Norfolk Island’s own Creaky ol’ convicts with broad arrow flags and face paint as many of our Daddies were playing in the games. This inspired us to have some off field running races to run as fast as our dads.

A big Thankyou to Kay from Norfolk Island Fitness + Health for donating some old gym equipment, we have certainly put them to good use from healthy obstacle courses for increasing our gross motor skills to becoming part of our imaginative play. Thanks again for your kindness in thinking of us.

Our next big theme that spanned over 2 weeks was ‘Space’. This gave us a chance to use lots of wonderful Montessori equipment to study the universe. We loved studying the galaxies on the ipad using starwalk and getting a closer look at satellites, planets, and types of stars. We even taught our parents about the phases of the moon and the lifecycle of a star. Our many art projects included drawing rockets, using chalk to draw the planets and shadows, making books on the order of planets and making our own name rainbow rockets. The biggest hit of the theme was when we were donated some large bottles and an idea from Ms Sarah Jenkins. We then took a trip to the hardware and newsagency to convert these bottles superfast jet packs complete with flames. These made us run very fast indeed and encouraged us to count down from 10-1 then zero. The children were great at taking turns and sharing the packs with friends. They understood how special they are when we made them ourselves.

Another favourite art recipe which will be available on our blog is for ‘moon sand’, a trough of this fine motor experience was very popular for the entire 2 weeks especially when we added alien eyes and moon dust on the second week. Thanks to one of our parents for bringing in ‘moon ice’ for another experience.

During space week we had an almighty excursion to Norfolk Island Central school for their book week celebrations. The Minischoolers all joined in the occasion by dressing up as well and were delighted to be asked to parade on the veranda stage with the rest of the school. We had pirates and cowboys, the cat and the hat and spot the dog. Even our very own teachers dressed as Mary Poppins and Fancy Nancy.

On this day there was a book fair in the library where the community were encouraged to donate $5 towards a book and receive a book plate inside the book containing the name of the donation, many of our preschool families donated as did minischool itself. The hardest part was picking which 10 books to donate from the preschool with so many wonderful titles on offer.

We appreciate the school allowing us to continue to use the school library each Thursday morning for all of  our preschool children to learn healthy reading and borrowing skills.

After the book fair we continued our big excursion day out at the post office where the wonderful staff helped us buy the stamps for the letters we had prepared to send locally and overseas. We posted them ourselves and then got to go to the mail sorting room to sort our own letters. One of our children got a big surprise to find a parcel ticket in his own box.

The children pretended to be freighted off in a large box and then enjoyed Kath’s story of Postie Kate before getting stamped before home.

Thank you so much to the Norfolk Island Postal staff and to the N.I.C.S staff for making it such a memorable day.

Phew, could we fit anything else in August…Yes we did. We finished the month and the winter season off with a Russian festival called Maslenitsa.

This Russian festival celebrates the end of the winter season and provided us with the chance to learn the cultural side of where one of our Minischool families heritage is.

We learned about the Imperial flag, the famous cathedral buildings, made Russian caramels, learned how to count and the colours in Russian as well as the unique 33 letter alphabet. It made another wonderful entry into our preschool passport.

Thank you to Lydia for showing us all of your wonderful collection of Russian artefacts. We really loved the 10 tiny matryoshka stacking dolls and the Russian crepes & pancakes you made as well as the other taste tests you provided.

From our garden we made the freshest beetroot relish fresh picked and grated within 10 minutes, It doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

For More Information about Minischool educational preschool you can follow us on facebook https://www.facebook.com/minischoolpreschool

Or you can find more photos and recipes on our blog

http://norfolkislandpreschool.blogspot.com
Minischool runs for 50 weeks per year. We will break from 20th December to 6th January.

Preschool vacation care is available for any local or visiting 3-6 year olds during the school holidays.

Thank you for all of your community support over the past 8 months,

Cristina and Mandy

For more information Ph 55678