Finger painting fun!

Paint, paint and more paint!  Just a little bit of messy fun and we even practised our letters too!!

Feeding the worms!!

We have been really good at recycling our rubbish and putting all our food scraps into the gold ice cream container at kai times.  Some of our scraps go to the worms and the rest goes into the compost here at Uxbridge.  We were so excited to take our first lot of scraps down to the worms and we all gathered around as Jo took the lid off the worm farm.  There was a few squeals and some curious faces as some of our worm friends were very very wriggly and had crawled all the way to the top of the farm!  They must have been hungry!

We're going on a fly hunt........

We're going on a fly hunt, we're going to catch a juicy one, we're not scared!!

What an adventure today as we adapted the version of the popular story the bear hunt into a fly hunt! Catching flies is a very big deal at Uxbridge as we had four little froggy pets to feed, so what a wonderful way to encourage looking after our pets, some dramatic play, teamwork and collaboration as we worked together searching for these juicy flies.  Over the bridge.... down the path...... by the fire engine....... up to the pirate ship.....  Our leader Renee showed great leadership as she led us on the escapade with net in hand and what success, four flies for our four frog friends, great result!!

Our Fire Truck is back!!

Let's just say this has been greatly missed!!   We have stared though the fence panels over the past two weeks just longing to play on it again.   Not sure if we had the space in our new beautiful playground, we grabbed the opportunity at our welcome picnic to get all our strong dads to carry it back in to see if it would fit and it did, hooray!  And it has been in popular demand once again!! It requires a little TLC but our children didn't mind as they spent the day jumping aboard and carrying out their imaginative play.  It was great to see our firefighters at work once again and how timely as we practised our routine fire drill today.

Playground Opening!

Playground Opening - Thank you to all of the families for supporting our fundraising initiatives over the last few years. The design and building team at Nature Play NZ have turned our wishlist into reality and we just love our new playground, it's amazing!! Tonight's ceremonial cutting of the ribbon by our licensee Lana has officially opened our new playground, Yippeeee!! :-)

Learning about composting and the worm farm!

We have just introduced in our new playground a compost and worm farm as part of our ongoing commitment to sustainability.  As we gathered around the lunch table today and at bubble time we discussed our new compost and worm farm and the sorts of things we will put in it everyday.  A simple way for us to achieve this and for the children to understand and learn is by having two containers now on the table at kai times for our scraps and rubbish.  A gold one (with a picture of a worm, banana and strawberry) is where all our food scraps will go and the black one is for any paper or packet rubbish.  It was kind of like a game really, which container do you put it in??  We all caught on really quickly, Ka pai Uxbridge children, this is a great start!

A little nature

There is nothing like exploring our own backyard and finding little creatures that live within.  There was a huge commotion today as a preying mantis was spotted on our water rill and the children could not wait to share it with teachers.  What was fascinating though was that it was brown in colour not green and when we moved it to safety away from the water and onto the tree, we noticed it was really hard to spot as it was the same colour as the tree trunk.  This lead us to talking about how it was camouflaged.  We had fun tracking it's movement and trying to spot it, "look it's there" pointed Georgia.  On our expedition of finding a good home for the praying mantis, we also spotted a wee ladybug and jumping spider too, it's amazing observing them and it was great to see everyone was so careful of our small friends.

💓 Happy Valentines Day 💓 xox

Hearts and flowers ........... a day full of love and good wishes!  We loved hearing all the children's idea's and thoughts on love and spent most of the morning making cards for the one's we love "Happy Valentines Day everyone"

Renee's great idea!

A little water slide fun on a sunny afternoon was just what our friend Renee requested, it's safe to say her friends thought this was a fantastic idea too, just the thing to cool off!  Belly down!!

Our first gardening expedition!!

A little compost, flowers from the plant barn and some eager children is all we needed to help create and transform our new garden.  Our flower garden is now looking very vibrant with the mixture of colours.  I wonder what we might plant in our other gardens here at kindy??  We will have to remember in this hot weather to give them lots of water everyday to help them grow.

Exploring our new playground!!

Welcome back to a new year and a new playground!!  We are so proud and excited with the transformation, it is hard to believe that this was our playground.  It is amazing!!  Thank you to Natures play who delivered our dream, such a lot of hard work over the holidays and what a collaborative effort from teachers, families and the design team coming up with all the idea's for what we all desire for our children.  It is certainly better than we had imagined and we have thoroughly enjoyed a wonderous first week, exploring and discovering our new environment. We were so excited to see everyone's reaction and hear what the children thought of the playground and parents too.  Here are a few snapshots of the children exploring our new playground.

The swings sets have been moved and are now up where the old sandpit used to be and the sandpit is right down the bottom in the corner.  

Here is Ethan working out how to use the tap on our new water rill

Our water pump requires co-operation and turn taking to make the water flow down our stoney river.

Water can still be found in the little water trough, one of many water play options. 

We even have a slide in the middle of the playground

Helping Liz to plant flowers in our new garden

A bit of fishing on the bridge

Puddles

Our mud pit is great for our feet or little excavators as Kain discovered

Our new outdoor cafe is a vibrant hub in our community, apparently coffee's are only $4,000!!

Add caption

Who's that trip tropping across the bridge?  Friends taking a stroll.

Wombat stew in the making

And we still kept the diggers

Teamwork!

Our new carpentry area

Gareth has made sure he has put his safety googles on

Introducing the puppeteers, enjoying the new grass!