Christmas Party 2019

Thank you to everyone for your support throughout 2019. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy and safe New Year. See you in 2020. 

Best Wishes from the Uxbridge Team. 

What do you get when you cross a teacher with Christmas decorations?

A Christmas Tree of course! 

As a fun mat time activity Deanne turned Nikki into a Christmas tree and everybody got to take a turn at choosing a decoration and hanging it on her. Doesn't she look beautiful!

Elfies Adventures at Uxbridge

At the beginning of December each year our friend Elfie arrives at Uxbridge. He can be a bit of a trouble maker but he is also lots of fun! Every day he puts himself in a new hiding place in the centre and brings the gift of a story, song, activity or resource which he leaves a hint or note about in our advent calendar. Here are some of the adventures that he got up to this year. 

 On his first day Elfie hid by our letter box. He brought us some fresh holly and some smarties with a recipe for Smarties Cookies for us to bake. They were delicious. 

 Here is Elfie hiding in our mat resources with some envelopes. His gift for us today was everything that we needed to write letters to Santa. We posted these that afternoon. 

 Hanging out on the Kumara eating Kumara chips!

 On this day Elfies gift was beads and materials for making Christmas necklaces

 Oh No!!! Santa ran out of wrapping paper to wrap all the presents he was making. Luckily he was able to send Elfie to Uxbridge with a note asking for help. Of course our tamariki were able to save the day by making more wrapping paper for Santa. 

 Another of Elfies surprises was cups and lots of beautiful fresh flowers to make our own Christmas arrangements. 

 Christmas head bands - so much fun, thank you Elfie!

 You have heard of "pin the tail on the donkey", Elfie brought us the Christmas edition, pin the nose on Rudolf. 

Elfies final gift of the year was a little piece of his home in the North Pole, big blocks of ice for us to explore. Ka kite ano Elfie, Merry Christmas, see you next year. 

Lettuce Wraps

There is nothing as satisfying as harvesting and eating vegetable that you have grown yourself. It gives such a feeling of accomplishment! The lettuces that we had planted in our garden were now ready to eat so we decided to make some delicious lettuce wraps with them. 

Santa letters and walking to Countdown.

We walked up to the supermarket to post some letters to Santa. We had received envelops and Santa stamps from Elfie the day before so many of our friends has made letters or pictures. 

It was a beautiful sunny day so it was a lovely walk up to the supermarket. It's neat to be out in the community with the children as they can point things out that are significant to them. 

Santa has a special letter box in Countdown Howick so that's where we headed to. 

We put the letters into one big envelope and put them in the box.....we cant wait for Santa to reply to us!!

We noticed a special sign at the entrance to Countdown saying they have a Elf that hides in new places each day too so of course we went around the supermarket looking for their Elf. We were super excited to find it and handed him into the front counter.....and as a prize for finding the Elf we got Christmas lollipops!! YUMMY. What a fun wee excursion we had!

Hurdles

We have purchased some new hurdles which have been lots of fun. These are supporting the tamariki's gross motor skills as they jump, run and balance their way over them. Focusing on moving with jumping off one foot and then onto jumping with two feet, the children have enjoyed moving these about, adding these to their own obstacle course or evening finding new and creative ways to incorporate them out in the playground.

Our first red ripe strawberry!

What to do when finding a red ripe strawberry in the garden?  Well Little mouse would say "cut it in two, half for me and half for you" and so we did!  

"Delicious" says Elle.   We also noticed all the tomatoes on our plant "When they turn red we can eat them too" says Nastasia.  Yes we can!  Hopefully they ripen for us to taste before we break for christmas.  We love being out in the mȧra huawhenua (vegetable garden) and Nikki says our lettuces are ready for harvest too, what shall we make with these??

Who's back??????

We had a very special friend come back to Uxbridge today...  "It Elfy" A very special Christmas elf sent to us by Santa.  He arrived with a very special letter for all the tamariki

Once again Elf is going to hide in a different place each day, he can move around by himself at night time because he is a magic Elf..... He is going to keep out a watchful eye as he is one of Santa's special helpers.

He reminded us to check our advent calendar each day as we countdown to christmas because inside each day there will be a special treat.  It may be a special recipe, craft, book or game to enjoy over the coming weeks!! We cant wait to see what we get each day!