Minischool : Minischool Mini news February 2015

Minischool Mini News February 2015

We are off in full swing of the new preschool year full of new excitement, theme style learning and early educational experiences on this wonderful island.

The still have preschool spaces on offer on Mondays and Wednesdays plus afterschool care every day for 3-12 year olds. We offer occasional care from 3-5pm straight from school which is perfect for fun, games and quality care during your meetings and much needed care for children during funerals.

During January, Minischool held a graduation ceremony and afternoon tea for our pre-schoolers transitioning to big school. The pre-schoolers were presented with all of their preschool work lovingly collated into their scrapbooks by Mandy and their all about me folders put together by Cristina. We are so proud of all that the preschool children learn and achieve while with us and are happy to give them their childhood memories in scrapbooks and folders (as well as their graduation certificates and other presents) to mark the end of each preschool journey.

All of our families were invited to this afternoon tea and after graduation, said goodbye to the graduates as they headed out together for the annual teachers dinner.

We thank the Paradise hotel for hosting the Minischool staff and all 11 graduates in the gazebo for a wonderful teacher/ student dinner.

There are well over 100 photos to view on our facebook page of this night.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.754180564670337.1073741858.391520660936331&type=3

Our new planning measures are firmly put into practise this year to further follow the NQS and EYLF. What on earth are these you may ask? The National Quality Standard (NQS) is divided into 7 areas that contribute to the quality of early childhood education and care &

Is a key aspect of the NQF and sets a national benchmark for early childhood education and care and outside school hours care services in Australia.

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) is designed to extend and enrich children's learning from birth to five. The Framework supports and provides guidance for educators working with children in all early childhood education and care settings.

I have been part of the quality child care assessment process in Qld and although it is extra work (mostly unpaid for those of us in a love job J) for those in the early education industry, it keeps the quality and standards of our workplaces high. Now enough of the boring department stuff we do after hours… here is the fun thematic learning we have been doing with the children at Minischool over the past month.

We started off with our beginning of the year with an ‘all about me’ theme to start of our scrapbooks and folders. This theme is a great way to transition our existing pre-schoolers to the oldest of the group and to our emerging toddlers to preschool status as it usually is all about them J This entire group have settled in quickly and beautifully as the older children help guide and mentor those starting preschool, they understand how much they have learned and developed themselves.

Valentine’s Day saw us sharing the love some more, posting special hand drawn pictures and letters to our Minischool friends and families.

We continued the love during our Chinese new year celebrations, making lanterns drawing mazes and dot to dots with were excellent fine motor activities. Our new garage space has been cleaned out and utilised as an extra room, this too was hung with lanterns to celebrate. This week was one of the wettest (and without petrol) so we missed out on an excursion to the goat farm at Anson bay to celebrate with our Hilli goat friends, but we looked at the photos from our excursion there late last year and found creative uses of our frozen goat milk including hot chocolates to keep us warm during the big wet & fog.

Following this was Safety week to ensure we are following the NQS Childrens health and safety guidelines. Safety involves so many learning areas of self-safety of sunscreen and nutrition, and environment safety where we may need the assistance of the police, ambulance and fire departments. Our Emergency evacuation drills were fun and the children took them seriously enough in a caring way towards their friends that made us so very proud of them!

Each time we offer a theme, we also build up our resources at Minischool based on those themes, though it is rare that we will offer the same activity 2 years in a row as the staff are always dreaming up fresh and innovative ways to teach.

This past week was a celebration of all Dr. Seuss books for his March 2 birthday. We celebrated a love of reading his wonderful books and crazy yet fantastic rhyming words. We even learned the morals of the stories by testing our senses by cooking and eating green eggs and ham. They were delicious! (More photos on facebook). My favourite was the ‘I wish I had duck feet’ race using flippers. It was very funny!

We love our weekly walk up to the library and school visit. Thankyou to the 4 teachers in infants and upper primary who let us visit your classrooms and the canteen. The children love their visit to the school, the bubblers and even the big school toilets.

Autumn saw us decorating and designing and autumn tree full of ‘A’s using the autumn colour scheme.

We offer a daily obstacle course at Minischool, this helps to develop and monitor Childrens gross motor, cognitive and other developmental needs. In partnership with this, we begin our developmental checklists this month on each child to pick up on any areas of need.

Upcoming themes over the next month are introducing back to basics, shapes for the younger group and more complex 3D shapes for our older group. We have fantastic Montessori materials to use throughout our themes; they are always loved by the children who chose them.

We haven’t forgotten St. Patrick’s Day full of Rainbows and colours plus Earth day and lessons in recycling.

In our gardens we are enjoying the feijoas and guavas which are all huge due to the rainfall. We made guava jelly at Minischool and enjoyed eating them on freshly made lemonade scones (recipe on our blog)

We were so lucky to have Jaspers granny come to Minischool for 2 weeks, she was a lovely addition to our team.

Every child is worth celebrating. For each child’s birthday we hold parties, make special cards, give presents, cook and eat cake and other goodies whether their birthday falls on their booked day or not.

Happy Birthday Last Month to Jasper who turned 5, Hamish turned 4 and Bonita also turned 4 (Welcome to Minischool Bonita) This month we say a Happy March Birthday to Billy who turned 5, his sister Matilda who is turning 3 and to Daphne (welcome back) who is turning 4.

These children enjoy being the child of the day and the special privilege of being the leader of all activities on their party day.

We said a sad farewell to Hamish last week, he starts at his new preschool in Australia this week, I am sure his new teachers will get as many laughs and hugs as we did. We will miss you.