Sun 

Newsletter Term 4

Well, here we are at the end of 2021! Yay us! When I look back at all we have achieved I feel so super proud of our Sun Room children.

This term we welcomed Bailey.N, Rosie, Amelia, Chase and Madeleine to Sun Room and we have really enjoyed getting to know them.

We want to take this opportunity to thank you for entrusting us to take care of your amazing children this year. We have loved watching them grow and learn, become confident in who they are and independent in the choices they make. It has been a privilege to be part of their learning journey.

For the children moving on to our Forest Room next year, they are about to embark on a wonderful adventure in pre kinder. We can’t wait to see just how much they will love this next stage of their life. For those of you staying in Sun Room, we have so many exciting plans for our year where we will see your children thrive - continuing to learn, discover and explore through play. It is through our play experiences that children learn to engage and interact in the world around them.

Let’s take a look back at what we got up to in Term 4.

Space Week!

We really enjoyed our space exploration. We learnt about the planets, astronauts, stars and meteors. Our highlight of space week was definitely making our very own Sun Room rocket! We were able to work together as a group and we learnt new skills which enhanced our confidence and curiosity. You could see we were using play to investigate, imagine and explore. Once we got inside the rocket our imaginations took over and we had so much fun counting down from 10 to 1 and then blasting off.

The children were able to illustrate their role playing skills, turn taking abilities and sense of adventure and fun. 

A huge thank you to Viktoriya, Caitlyn and our Sun Room children for creating such an awesome learning experience!

Superhero Week!

Superheroes are an emerging interest for our children. So with great excitement we embraced celebrating Super Hero Week! Many of the children came dressed up and we had several experiences set up to support their learning. Throughout this week we saw so much role play occur. Role play among children is a fun way to learn and enhance developing skills. Role playing builds confidence, communication, creativity and problem solving and we just love to see the children having so much fun!

Halloween!

It’s that spooky time of year that we just love! We made potions, caught spooky spiders, created play dough monsters, made delicious cookies and searched for bugs and insects in our spooky sensory trays and we loved dancing along to Halloween baby shark.

Diwali

Diwali is the Festival of Lights! We spread joy with friends and loved ones.

People decorate their homes with lights and oil lamps, called Diyas.

Diwali is India’s most important festival of the year. To extend on our learning about Diwali, Viktoriya helped us make Diyas. A Diya signifies goodness and good luck, purity and power. We made ours from salt dough and used sparkles to help them shine.

With our Big Chefs help Little Chefs program and with the help of Tejal, we made Peda. Peda is a sweet biscuit from India. We had lots of fun with our Field Room friends mixing the ingredients together, shaping the mixture into balls, then pressing the stamp into the biscuit to leave a beautiful flower imprint.

Threading with beads (From Charlotte)

This year has been a great year for our children’s fine motor skills.

With this in mind I wanted something challenging to finish off the year, and so I decided that threading would be a great activity for our sun room children.

Not only just threading but having the children make their very own sun catchers to hang on one of our trees outside. 

It was great to see how far the children have come, some needing help threading and others doing it with ease.

Giving the children the choice to choose their own beads gave their sun catchers individuality, showing us which beads they liked the best.

Putting on the beads is one of the challenges of the activity, but even holding the string with one hand and a bead in the other showed the true development of our children. 

I am sad to see our children move up next year but excited to hear about how their fine motor skills can develop in a different room with different activities.

Excursions to the Park

We are so lucky to have the opportunity to visit the park as often as we do.  The children just love it and it is so beneficial for them.  We see it building their confidence and sense of responsibility, they are able to connect with nature, and bond as a group.

Recycling Week

With the help of Caitlyn we explored Recycling Week. The theme for this year was “Step it up this Recycle Week”. We learnt about the words “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. We also learnt why we have different rubbish bins and what can go in the bins.

We explored the wonderful world of worms! What food scraps they can eat and how do they help look after our world.

One of my favourite quotes about taking care of our environment comes from The Lorax… ”Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not." (Dr.Seuss)

So let’s do all that we can to look after our world.

Road Safety

During road safety week we had conversations about traffic lights, seat belts, and road safety. We learnt the Auslan signs for Stop, Slow and Go.

To help further our learning we joined with Field Room to take the children for a walk and go across the school crossing. We used our walking feet, our listening ears, we looked at the traffic and with the help of our wonderful Field Room friends and our lollypop lady Nicole, we safely crossed the road and then made our way back to Haven.

Well done everyone! 

We made a mud kitchen!

We had so much fun working together to build our mud kitchen. Lesley and Caitlyn had a conversation with the children about what they were doing and the tools they were using. The tools were noisy but so fascinating to the children. We took the opportunity to talk about how we use the tools, why we need to be safe and how they help us when we are putting something together. With the assistance of Lesley and Caitlyn the children that chose to were offered the chance to try the power drill and were so excited and proud of the work they were doing to help put our mud kitchen together. Well done Sun Room!

This type of challenging/risk play is so beneficial to children. The autonomy and sense of agency that comes from being trusted to use tools safely under supervision, is attributed to increased resiliency and responsibility in our children.

There are so many specific skills that are developed when children are encouraged to play and build using real tools. By working with tools and helping to complete a task, we are working on fine motor development, but we are also improving self control, decision making, overall confidence and persistence.

Our Garden

Gardening has been a huge passion of our Educators in Sun Room and an emerging interest for our children. We are very fortunate to have Viktoriya, Caitlyn and Lesley to lead us through our gardening journey. What we notice from this experience is that the children are learning new skills, having fun, playing and developing their self confidence by spending time in the garden tending to our plants. We believe that some of the most beneficial learning experiences come from the teachable moments. Our garden promotes opportunity for the children to be actively engaged with hands on learning.

Christmas!

It really is the most wonderful time of the year! We explored and celebrated the season through our experiences, songs and stories. This was to help enhance our children’s connectedness and different ways of belonging. This in turn helps with learning new ways which reflect the values, traditions and practices of our families and communities.

Our end of year Christmas Party in the park!

Well, what fun this was! We had bubbles, dancing and food! We had hand and face painting and even our Field Room friends came to visit. Thank you so much to the parents and grandparents that came along to join us too, we appreciate all your support and it made the day so special!

Transitions . . .

Transitions to our Forest Room will begin the second week of January. An Educator from Sun Room will stay with the children in Forest Room throughout this transition time making the adjustment a happy and secure one.

If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to come and have a chat with us.

Thank you!

I just wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your support, laughs and encouragement throughout this year. Having the opportunity to be lead educator of Sun Room was very challenging but so amazingly rewarding and absolutely full of huge learning opportunities for me. Looking back over the year that was, I can see how much we achieved as a group, we accomplished so many of our goals and I’m just filled with pride for all our children and our Sun Room team.

So, from all of us in Sun Room, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year!!

• Ann- Maree, Caitlyn, Charlotte, Lina, Lesley, Nicole, Viktoriya and Danni.