Planting and Harvesting

22nd October 2009

Spring time is here and the garden is flourishing. We have started to pick some of the crops in the vegetable garden. The morning children have made 'Dinosaur Pie' using some of the silverbeet and the afternoon children have been enjoying fresh parsley, silverbeet and broccoli with the kai time fruit. "It's yummy!" exclaimed one child as she ate piece after piece of the raw silverbeet.
Then last week some of the morning children helped to plant some potatoes in a special potato drum. We dug out some great compost from our own compost bin as a starter and then added potting mix to this. The children carefully placed the seed potatoes on top of the soil and then covered them up with some more of the mix. Now we just have to wait and watch and hopefully before too much longer we will see the first of the potato sprouts pushing their way through the soil. Let's hope that we are not too late to have some new potatoes for Christmas!

The Bead Gallery Visit - September 10th, 2009

Off we went, 10 afternoon children and 4 adults out to Richmond Mall's Bead Gallery shop. Children's interest and fascination with beads has continued from August and so, these children, who have all engaged in the bead making process at Kindergarten, visited the shop where the initial interest started.
We learnt:

• nearly all of the beads come from India
• all the children could thread their own beads with the right threading twine
• that there are many colours, shapes and patterns on the beads
  

After the holidays, some old and new recipes for bead making will continue.....but as we are interested in visual arts and further provoking children's thinking....will all the beads end up as a bracelet?!

Harold the Giraffe

Every year, Broadgreen Intermediate kindly extend an invitation to Nayland Kindergarten morning children and teachers to visit the Harold Room.
Harold's helper - Jenny, introduces Harold.
1. Jenny asks the children what Harold will need for a weekend visit.
2. What does our body need? Children put matching pictures onto the poster of the body. What makes Harold happy or sad and what makes us feel that way.
3. Next, food that is good and not so good is selected and placed on the wall.
4. Surprise - children lie down and sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and fairy lights light up on the ceiling - just wonderful!
5. Harold sings a song to the children about getting fit and staying healthy.
We all leave the trailer...until next year.

Nayland Primary Room 12 visit

On an overcast day, we walked down the road to Nayland Primary School. It was our turn to visit Mrs Jimmink and Room 12 at school. However, we were in for a treat - we visited the library first and then when we went to Room 12 to eat our lunch.
In the library, Mrs Jimmink explained the rules of being inside the library. Then a story was read by Mrs Jimmink and then all the children had an opportunity to choose books and 'browse'. Mrs Jimmink explained that browsing was when children carefully turned the pages and looked at the pictures and words in the book to see if the book would be of interest.
We do plan to keep these reciprocal visits happening - especially after farewelling so many children at the end of the term...

Bird Feeders

Sustainability - how to keep feeding the sparrows other than the plastic bird feeder? Make a different bird feeder of course.
On a cold day, a Mum at Kindergarten, who was looking for a job!?, agreed to whizz up the peanuts into peanut butter.
The afternoon children then poked, smeared and covered pinecones with the peanut butter. We then covered the peanut butter with seed and they hung from the trees. Yes - they do work as you can see!
We will continue to explore sustainability ideas and projects from children, families and teachers interests'.

Entertained by Levity

Monday 14th September
This week it was the morning children's turn to have a special entertainer in. Levity came to share his music, dances, games, stories and humour with the children. What fun we all had! He kept the children's interest right through, involving them in activities and just being the wonderful entertainer that he is. We hope to be able to invite him back in again next time he is in Nelson. In the meantime, we have bought two of his C.D.s so that we can practice some of his songs and dances.

Fun Fern Coaching Session by Tina

Some children and parents have been practising their netball skills at Fun Ferns at Saxton Field Sportsground.
So a couple of parents who are real Fun Fern coaches ran a coaching session at Nayland Kindergarten:
1. Blow the whistle and change, stretching exercises – legs, waist, ankles, ,
2. Fox and goose game - fox at the end of the line wants to eat the goose at the beginning of the line....lots of fun
3. Pass the ball backwards over head and then between legs from front of line to end of line.
4. Last game - all the balls are in a big nest in the middle and there are 4 nests around the outside - go raid the big nest and other nests to collect the most balls - just lots of fun!!!
Thank you to our parents who ran the coaching session - it was enjoyable and we now have a few more ideas for fun games.

Roger Sanders - Story teller

This afternoon we had Roger Sanders visiting Kindergarten to share two of his stories with the children. The children sang a welcome song to him before he started to tell the stories. His first story was about a hat seller and he had the children transfixed as he narrated his story. The second story, to a smaller audience (some children went off to play or have some kai), was about a magic porridge pot. With both stories Roger weaved a little bit of music through by playing the bongo drums, a beautiful sounding Swiss drum, a recorder and his guitar. And when the story session was finished the children were able to have a turn on his drums. Thanks, Roger!

Parent workshop

Sarah Langi from
Waste Education Services - Nelson and Tasman supported and delivered practical and very useful information to parents at Nayland Kindergarten about......
Bokashi, Composting and worm farming.
We saw parents leaving kindergarten - armed with discount vouchers and lots of enthusiasm to start the recycling journey - good on ya!!!

Mosaics. learning a new process together

During my time at Pinegrove Kindergarten the children and teachers created some mosaic garden art. I discovered the Nayland Kindergarten team had discussed creating something similar.
I was game. Lets give it a try.

To introduce the art of mosaics we found some wonderful library books that told of the history, explained the process and suggested ideas for creating wonderful mosaic work.
Paper mosaics were our first step. Children quickly understood and explored this new form of creativity. Some of the results are now displayed on the wall.
Both morning and afternoon sessions have created paper mosaics.

The next stage of our exploration was to roughen the surface of the pipes ready to glue on the tiles. Using two different kinds of file, we had willing helpers over many days until the surfaces were ready.
Then... putting on safety glasses and talking about the sharpness of edges and the need for thoughtfulness and care, we set about breaking the coloured tiles into small pieces.
Now... the gluing of tiles is underway.
Check out the progress next time you have a moment.
This will be an on going project.
Some thought will have to go into where the best place for the finished works might be in our playground.

We made a start

Our visit to Ecofest certainly got us inspired to give a bokashi compost a go at kindergarten and at home and once we had purchased the buckets we were ready to go.


As always there were so very keen helpers, who helped me cut up the food scraps and sprinkle bokashi mix over it as we layered the food. What a great way to spend part of the morning, learning about something new, chatting about the process and talking about how we would show our own families what a great idea bokashi is.

Bokashi Compost Worm farming

An invitation to all parents to come along on Wednesday morning to discover how you can start composting, worm farming and setting up an inside compost - a bokashi bucket.
Sarah - our advisor from the Small planet programme has a wealth of knowledge and 'how to' in getting started on the compost journey...
This workshop is for parents - so please come along.

Wednesday - Sept 2nd - 9-11 am

Put your name on the compost form so we know how many parents are coming - morning tea provided.

Our Pyjama Party

14th August

What fun we all had at our pyjama party, where we danced, ate yummy breakfast food and saw a play. This was organised by one of the children with Margie's help. Invitations went out, requests for breakfast food and she even had some of the teachers organised to act out "The Three Bears" for the children, also starring herself and her brother. It was very cool that Room 12 from Nayland Primary joined us for breakfast and a play with friends, allowing some children who had only just started school to come along and join in with the party fun. Thanks for a wonderful party!

What to do on a wet day? Make a water slide of course!

A piece of black polythene, a little bit of soap and a whole lot of water makes for a fast fun slippery water slide.

Children took responsibility for the water, holding the disk steady for their friends to get on, pushing their friends down the slide and then returning the disk to the top of the mound for the next person to have a go. There was a long line of children waiting to have their turn. Only down side was having to call it quits when the rain drops got to big!

Welcome to all the new families joining our blog

It is exciting to have our families now viewing our blog and the teachers look forward to your comments. You will notice that under each entry there is "a comment" tag, which you enter onto and leave your comment, these will be viewed by the teachers before they are posted, so it will appear within a few days. It is a great opportunity to add in your child's comments as they look at the blog also, as there are so many things that happen on any one day and it is a wonderful way to trigger children's thinking and sharing of their day too.
You will also notice a tag at the bottom "older posts", click on it and it will take you back to earlier posts.
This is a great way to share our significant events each week and to keep families involved in the kindergarten programme.