Chicken Love

 Over this week we have been enjoying our chicken cuddles.

The children are learning how to hold them gently and there has been an outpouring of love for them. Lucky chicks and lucky tamariki. 

Here are a few photos of some snuggling!

"It's so soft." Madison

"Me,me me!" Eiichi kept coming back for more chicken love!

" AWW He's own my arm!"-Leah

" We have chickens at home."- Hazel's family took our last lot of girls home to enjoy forever and Kelly tells me one of them still enjoys coming inside and sitting on her lap! How wonderful.

Owen was so confident with our baby chicks.

"Oh it's so cute." Phoebe

There will be many more cuddles coming. This Thursday Jo from Living Eggs will pick up the remainder of the chickens but Uxbridge will keep 3 little ladies and their new cage is being prepared all ready for our new pets... now to pick the names that the children have come up with and boy there are some goodies! Keep watching this space.

Holi Hai!

What a day filled with high energy and full of colour to celebrate Holi at Uxbridge!  

Traditionally the colours used to celebrate werefrom

Holi were from flowers and herbs and each colour represented a different purpose, at Uxbridge we used paint. Holi has become larger in westernised countries but is originally celebrated of Hindi  to triumph good over evil and the changing of seasons to Spring. 

 

This stemmed some conversations around where we are in the world and that we have different seasons / night and days to those on the other side of the world.

 Tamariki talked about local colour runs and we-linked  how traditionally colours are thrown over you on Holi when wearing white tshirt, just like what would happen at a colour run. So great to link our learning to children’s knowledge.

 

We had colourful splat art with the fly swats, coloured water and balls, dancing and stories of Holi,henna tattoo ant and the very popular… throwing of the painted paper. Colour was everywhere and the smiles were prevalent with another successful Holi celebrated at Uxbridge. 

The Frogs first Fly!

Everyone crowded around the tank to watch. 

With high anticipation the fly flew around the tank , zooming this way and that way. 

Our little frog 🐸 waited , pounced, slipped and missed many times as he learnt how to catch a fly. 

We talked about how the frog would need to practise as he hadn’t caught a fly before. That it’s like us, we too need to practise things to learn how to do them. 

 Our other tadpoles are now froglets with their little legs beginning to form and tails beginning to shorten. It’s wonderful to have an up close and personal experience with natures life cycles . 

Getting out and about in the community....

 

Community based learning.. Lets visit the libary to further our knowledge and build connections with our local community. We have invited Andy to visit Uxbridge ELC... 

Andy at Howick library is a familar face who helps us find books to futher our knowledge around common interests emerging. 

The children are learning about technology and learning about the computer to search for books. 

Here are our books - that will help us learng about our baby tadpoles, our frogs and our chickens that arrive at kindy next week - so we can watch them hatch from the eggs righ in front of our eyes. 

The children get to scan the books and now it is time to wander back to kindy. 

Clay Creatures - inspired by The Gruffalo

 

At Uxbridge we are have explorig how we can make stories , 'come to life'. 

The clay was setup, and some of our children were intrigued in this texture and colour as we have purchased a different colour clay.  

As a provocation we had the Gruffalo book positioned to inspire these great creations.  

So  much thought and detail have gone into these creations The little brown mouse with the very long tail, the Gruffalo with all his details right down to his spikes on his back. 

Jack was super proud of his mouse that had long wavy hair upon the mouses head. 

The possibilites are endless with clay these are some of the wonderful learning opportunies that can come from exploring clay in many forms. 

-Using a tool to make markings and indentations.

-Making textures and impressions.

-Manipulating (squishing, squeezing, pulling, pushing, etc)  a piece of clay helps develops the child’s large and small muscles – improving dexterity.
-Fosters eye-hand coordination.
-Builds a child's ability to focus/builds attention span.
-Builds an experiential understanding of 3-dimensional shapes.

-Builds vocabulary – pound, pinch, roll, flatten, poke, tear squeeze, coil, stretch, squash, twist, and bend

-Creative story telling with clay pieces