Dear families,

This term has been packed full of fun activities and learning experiences to broaden children’s learning and discovery of the world around them. We loved being able to plan the term based on the interests and suggestions from children to create a program that is not only educational, but a whole lot of fun!

This year, Jade has now stepped up to coordinator again while Amy is on maternity leave! We have had many new educators join us to help out this term, mainly Renae, Sandra, and Adrianna. We have loved having them on board to bring new experiences and ideas to the service.

We have also welcomed lots of new preps into OSHC this term and we are loving to see all the new little faces and well as welcoming back our regular children! It’s amazing to see new friendships forming as well as old friendships coming back together this term.

This term the school ran the sausage sizzle fundraiser at Bunnings. Of course, we wanted to get involved to and be apart of the community, so we generously paid for all of the sausages and bread! We hope the fundraiser went well and lots of money was raised for the school!

Week 1

We settled back into the school year with the theme of “Welcome Back”, which allowed us to introduce (or reintroduce) ourselves to each other and find out which activities and learning experiences we love doing and would love to do at OSHC. We spent the week doing child-led experiences such as down ball (which has lasted throughout the whole term!), fox dramatic play, and dodgeball. This week we also began creating our own portfolios for the year which will be filled with the children’s artworks and learning observations done by the educators. With lots of new faces, and some of our children now left the school, we updated our birthday chart with the children’s input. Each child wrote their name and birthday on a leaf, and then decorated it! We then hung them all up on a branch. We also created our collaborative journal for the year and wrote down our ideas for weekly themes, activities, and afternoon tea.

Week 2

This week we explored the theme of “My Body”. We explored all things mind, body and soul as it’s important that we know our body and ways we can look after it (especially with the dreaded Covid going around)! We had a big discussion about healthy foods and what foods we should be eating daily as part of the food chart. We explored germs and how washing our hands can help protect us and others by doing a dish soap and pepper experiment. We put pepper into a pan of water, and then put dish soap on our fingers. We then touched the pepper with our fingers and watched the pepper move away so fast! We played pin the head on the skeleton which not only taught the children about parts of the body, but also helped them practice and develop their coordination. Lastly, we finished the week with a grounding exercise where we named 5 things we could see, 4 things we could feel, 3 things we could hear, 2 things we could smell and 1 thing we could taste. This practice is really handy in helping children regulate their emotions.

Week 3

This week we got outside and off the screens and explored our ‘natural world’. The children absolutely loved this week. The Monday we had a pupil free day, which was jam packed with so many fun learning experiences. We painted our TheirCare garden bed and gave it a spruce up as it was looking a bit sad. All the children got involved with this, which was so good to see. We even created our own pet rocks, using paint to decorate them and then adding googly eyes and buttons! They were so cute. We began collecting our left-over fruit scraps for our worm farm this week. Our worms were so hungry after the long summer break! The children love going out to feed the worms and see how many there are. We also made natural playdough by colouring in with tea! Who knew that we could use something other than food dye to colour something! During the week we had lots of discussions about recycling and composting, and what we could actually throw away in the compost bin and recycling bin. Looking after our environment is so important and allowing the children to learn how to do this through child-led experiences makes it lots of fun!

Children’s voice: “I made the skeleton a material gworl” – Bella S

Week 4

Roarrrr!!! This week was inspired by the love of dinosaurs from Archie and Alfie! These two are always colouring in dinosaurs or creating their own, so we just had to extend on this learning and allow the other children to get involved too! We set up the dramatic play area with a sensory dinosaur space. This included the toy dinosaurs, fake grass, our little tree house that was made by someone in the community, and the jungle scenery toys. The children loved colouring in their own dinosaurs and creating their own dinosaur!

Week 5

Week 5 had us getting our creative caps on. We explored all things arty, but with a sensory touch as our children LOVE sensory experiences. The children loved creating marble art with shaving foam and food dye, and although it got very messy, the outcomes looked spectacular! We also had a try at puffy paint, which was ‘paint’ made from flour and was meant to be puffy to touch when dry. Unfortunately, it didn’t end up being fluffy but we still got to create something amazing and experiment what works. It also looked sparkly at the end which was interesting! We also tried to create pulled string art, but as the children pointed out, next time we should try using actual paint instead of watercolour! It was so good to finally get some new pieces of art to hang up in our room and update our art wall. We also went outside and did some art on the pavement with chalk. We all worked together to create a giant colourful smiley face! We nearly used up all of our chalk but it was worth it in the end.

Children’s voice: “My favourite thing this term was doing the pin art” – Oscar A

Week 6

With the discussion of the famous meme ‘Doge’ and where the real-life dog is today, came ‘Doge week’. Mainly inspired by Rayne, Dash, Soren, Zoey, this week we dressed up as Doge, did some Doge drawings and colouring ins, and even made Doge Pokémon cards! The main event that the children loved this week was the Dogeminer game, where the children were able to learn about money (dogecoin) and how to save to get “upgrades” to get even more dogecoin! The children were so interested in this and we were able to extend this learning to create a shop in the next couple of weeks.

Children’s voice: “I liked playing dogeminer” – Bella S

Week 7

Lights, Camera, Action! This week saw us explore all things movies and performing arts. From the very requested activity of making iMovies throughout the whole term, we decided to explore this for an entire week. The children spent the week making their own costumes out of paper and craft supplies, producing, and directing their storyline and then of course filming their iMovie! It was so amazing to see the creativity that went into the iMovies. At the end of the week we had a very special movie night, along with popcorn with m&ms and pretzels! We watched the movie ‘Back to the outback’ which is about Australian animals and it was very funny! We set up the room like a movie theatre with chairs in rows, and even made our own movie tickets. Darcy punched the tickets as everyone arrived, Bella served the food and Lilliana showed everyone to their seats.

Children’s voice: “I love making the movie tickets!” – Lilliana S

Week 8

This week saw us getting wild with “Animal” week. Leading on from the animal movie on Friday, we began to explore different animals around the world. We did lots of animal colouring in. The children absolutely love colouring in at OSHC and it’s one of their favourite things to do here. Some children get really artistic and even start to use shading. We also used templates to make animals with hama beads. We did some animal dress ups this week (dress ups are clearly another favourite) and the children made some more cat and dog dress ups using paper. We extended on our learning from Doge week and created our own animal shop, where the children put prices on the teddy bears, set up a shop and sold them with the play money! The highlight of this week was the animal board games circuit. We put out three animal board games on the tables where children could play and switch as they please. The favourite board game was ‘trapped penguin’, where children used their problem-solving skills to knock out the “ice blocks” while trying to not let the penguin fall!

Week 9

To celebrate the final week of having Darcy L at the service, we focused on his interest of Minecraft. This week we got out how pickaxes and crafting hats and mined straight into the week of Minecraft. We of course had the opportunity to play Minecraft Education Edition on the laptop. The children loved taking turns and helping each other search for diamond in caves, build houses, and attack the mob zombies. This week Jade was away for 2 afternoons so we were lucky enough to have Lily back (who used to work at Menzies 2 years ago), and a new face, Emilee! On the Wednesday with Emilee, we mixed 2 of our most popular interests together and made Minecraft Pokémon cards! Next term we will definitely have to do a Pokémon week. This week we also went outside and played Minecraft in real life! It was so fun pretending to be different animals and characters from the game.

Week 10

We are finishing off the term with a bang, pop, and fizzle with our science week! Based on lots of observations and the suggestions from children, we thought Science week would be perfect to finish off the term with some fun, while extending on all the learning going on this term. We will be exploring the mixing of colours through rainbow walking water, and the skittles experiment. One of our requested activities is elephant toothpaste, so we are going to be spending an afternoon doing this and seeing what happens when chemicals are mixed and why. We are also doing lots of sports this week, focusing on the science of our own bodies! This week has been a whole lot of fun and we are excited to have even more fun and learning next term!

Children’s voice: “I am so excited to do elephants toothpaste!” – Jon M

Birthday Celebrations

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