River Room

 Hello 2022!

Welcome to all of our families to the River room term 1 newsletter. We send out a newsletter every term to give a brief summary of what adventures we’ve been on over the past 3 months. And boy! Hasn’t this term been a busy one. 

First off we wave goodbye and good luck to our 2021 river children graduating up into the sun room. After a short time of settling in period, they appear to settle in into their new classroom very well. *wipe the tears away* how brave the children are as they’ve shown us educators how much they have grown. Soon enough the river team became busy as we welcome in new children and families. 

With all of our new families beginning their journey at Haven or returning to Haven, we as educators make a huge effort to support and reassure all of the new children settling in into the river room environment. This is a daunting step for most children, especially after being through lock-down after lock-down. Our main goal for term 1 is to develop those relationships with the new children and families with our friendly river team.  

                                Building relationships

Educators are forming bonds with each child as this is a vital step for our environment and program. We learn about each child’s developmental stage and their overall well-being. From collecting this information, it helps the educators to set the direction of our learning experience and program for term 1 and it may continue onto for the rest of the year. Having built positive relationships between educators and children it helps the child feel free to explore, play and learn as a variety of opportunities are presented for them to grow.  

                            Let the confidences shine!

The children are becoming more comfortable seeing the familiar faces of the river educators. We are receiving smiles, laughter and a slight attitude from some of the children. Fabulous to see the children becoming confident in their own skin as they grow into their own little person. We encourage each child to shine, so it strengthens their self confidence to explore and learn in this environment, where we provide a variety of learning opportunities. 

                           Yummy! Yummy! Mealtimes!

We like to focus on mealtimes as eating together. It brings a certain mannerism for the children to begin to understand the value of eating together. This provides opportunity for one on one with the educator or sometimes 3 children in high chairs to one educator.  It's sometimes a juggling act, but we make it through! It also provides the opportunity for the children to sit among their peers, at the table, while observing what they are eating. It encourages the children to give the food a try if they see their peers eating it too. Majority of the meals on our menu the children absolutely love it! We have a variety of dishes that the children would scoff down because it taste so delicious. 

                                      Wheels in motion

Cars go vroom vroom vroom! Oh how the children absolutely love playing with the wheels. We have a variety of wheels for the children to explore and play with. Some are as small as their hand and some are as tall as their body's. The wheels that are as tall as their body's help to improve their gross motor skills and coordination while climbing in and out of the vehicle. The wheels that are as small as their hands help to improve their hand-eye coordination and balancing skills as they travel along the ground. The children love to experiment the effect of the wheels as it rolls forward or backwards while travelling at different speeds.  

                                   Stacking the blocks

Stacking the blocks is so much fun! The children get a lot of satisfactions out of building their own tower. Some towers might be vertical or some might be landscape, each towers are built unique with the child's own intention. The children mostly enjoy experimenting with cause and effect of the towers. The children and educators would build a tower together, then shortly afterwards the tower would fall to the ground with laughter in the air. What fun play learning opportunity for the children to further develop their problem solving skills through cause and effect, trail and error, experimenting .  

                   Follow the bunny he has chocolate!

The children joined in on our Easter celebration as we created many fun play experiences. It introduce the fun vibes around Easter time. The Easter bunny comes to visit, chocolate eggs are waiting to be found and the chicken eggs are bright and colourful with ink patterns all over them. The children absolutely enjoy all the activities that we had created for them as they learn about Easter.

Now the year 2022 has settled in we have the pram program continuing on throughout the year, hopefully we can catch some days with nice weather to adventure out in our community. Next term, we would like to work on setting children's goals for the year as we collaborate with each of the families for each child's well being personal growth.  

Keep an eye open for all the fun and adventures in the next terms newsletter! 

From River Team

Grace, Cate, Jess, Kayleigh, Tanika