River Room

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. 

At the end of term 2 the children in the River room have settled in into the environment of learning through play. The children have built solid relationships with the educators and now beginning to develop friendships among their peers. Our older children are being gentle and caring towards our younger children and our younger children want to follow the older children. All of the children have the opportunity to explore and learning through play to build their curiosity as they learn more about this world. Here are our focus topics during this term. 

ANZAC 

We acknowledge ANZAC day with a few activities to introduce to the children that relate to ANZAC. We got our hands busy by mixing the ANZAC biscuits mixture together with the flour, oats and butter. The children were curious about how these ingredients and were surprise to see the results, biscuits. We also acknowledge ANZAC day with some painting and pasting activities of creating our own poppies. The poppies represent ANZAC as they bloom from the battle field after the war was declared over. 

Mother’s Day/Special Person Day 

We would like to take a moment and acknowledge this special day.  Unfortunately our plans didn't go according to plan this year. Hope all of our mothers and special person enjoy their beautiful heart warming gift from their creative child.  

Farm Animals

Exploring farm animals with the children this term has been fulfilling as we dove into this topic where the children learn about each sound each of the animals make as they communicate among themselves. We learnt the sounds of the animals through singing a song such of old MacDonald had a farm. We incorporated puppets into the singing along where the children could see the animal as we identify them and their sound. We got our crafty hands busy as we painted and glued our animals. All the children had a ball exploring and developing their creative skills. River room participated with the Field room incursion of the life cycle of chickens. A few chicks would come to visit the river room during their stay at Haven, where the river children got to observe, feel their feathers, listen to the sound that the chicks make and feel the weight of a chick while holding the chick in their hand or on their leg. 

Beep Beep!

Is what the children would try to recreate as we hear that sound coming from the traffic lights from time to time. The children enjoy seeing the cars come and go, as the drivers drive past the centre. This had spark an interest to explore this topic. The children adventure through driving cars and bikes in our outdoor play. We have different types of vehicles indoors for the children to experiment with pushing the car around and seeing how far they travel. From this we extended onto creating our own car track markings where we rolled the cars over the paint to see the effect of guiding the cars. We introduce road signs and traffic lights to the children to introduce to the children. They may not fully understand but it's the beginning for the children to learn about roads and the safety behind each element. 

Autumn has sprung and now it's has fallen

We introduce this topic to the children as they begin to take interest in the different colour leaves that's on the ground. We were blown away as the interest continues to build through many arts and crafts activities for the children to learn about the colours that's usually presented in this season and the shapes of the leaves. We followed through on an fun activity where we hopped in our prams and visit our local park, where we spotted all the fallen leaves on the ground. We took this opportunity for the children to grab a whole bunch leaves and then throw it up into the air. Oh what laughter and smiles had occur! The children thoroughly enjoy this experience of an semi unplanned play learning experience. 

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

Oh wait, that's just me! The children are finding their confidences as they recognise themselves in the mirror. The children are beginning to be aware of facial expresses as they see themselves smiling in the mirror. The children begin to see the cause and effect of themselves moving from one side of the mirror to the other. This sparks interest and curiosity in the world in which they live in. 

Out and about in our community

During this term we had our friendly librarian from the local Rowville library came to visit us. She brought some intriguing books that have characters popping out of the book. The children absolutely enjoy having our local librarian reading stories to us. As part of our river room we have a pram program where educators strap the children into their harness and off we go for a stroll around our local community. We sometimes visit the local shopping centre (stud park shopping centre) or we visit local parks. Every time we adventure out we experience new fun ways to learn while we play. 

What's to come...

We will begin to learn through play with the topics of brushing teeth, exploring and identifying colours and numbers, developing our independence skills (self dressing, packing up and looking after ourselves.), science week, Dress up days  (PJ day, Genes for jeans day, book week and grand final day) and a few more exciting events.