LOCKLEYS EARLY LEARNING CENTRE
NEWSLETTER August 2018
NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR
SA Dental Service
Keep your kids smiling
Dental care is FREE for ALL babies, preschool and most children under 18 years at School Dental Service clinics.
The School Dental Service is a Child Dental Benefits Schedule provider.
Call us now for an appointment!
Your local clinic is: Marleston Community Dental Clinic
Phone: 7501 6700
www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/sadental
Farewell – We are very sad to say that Hema will be leaving the Centre to move to Melbourne due to her husbands re-location of employment. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Hema for her outstanding contribution to this Centre, the children, the educators and the families. We wish her and her family the very best for the future in Melbourne.
Congratulations –We are pleased to say that Bek, from Prekindy, will be moving to Preschool to join Sandra and Nicole, and in addition, Bek will undertake the role of Educational Leader with me at an Assistant Director level.
DATES TO REMEMBER
Disco Day Theme – Bright & Sparkly Thurs 9th August
Science Week 13th – 17th August
Book Week
Theme: Find your Treasure 18th – 24th August
Dress Up Day Fri 24th August
Father’s Day Afternoon Tea Fri 31st August
Multicultural Week:
Each day a different culture 3rd – 7th September
Amazing Drumming Monkeys Mon 10th September
Labour Day
Centre Closed Mon 1st October
Tie Dye Tuesday
Bring in a white T-shirt Tues 9th October
Photo day
Thurs 1st November
Fri 2nd November
Disco Day 80s Theme Tues 6th November
Diwali Festival Wed 7th November
Children’s Christmas Parade Tues 11th December
Children’s Christmas Party Wed 12th December
Shared Christmas Lunch Mon 24th December
Christmas Day/Boxing Day
Centre Closed Tues & Wed 25th-26th December
Parents who previously claimed lump sum payments The new Child Care Subsidy cannot be claimed as a lump sum at the end of the 2018-19 financial year. If families who claimed Child Care Benefit or Child Care Rebate as a lump sum in the past still have child/ren attending child care, they will need to submit a new claim for Child Care Subsidy as soon as possible to avoid paying full fees. Families should sign into their Centrelink online account through MyGov and complete a Child Care Subsidy claim.
Centrelink can backdate payments for care provided up to 28 days before the date the family submitted their claim.
Families can still submit a lump sum claim for Child Care Benefit or Child Care Rebate for any approved child care used in the 2017-18 financial year. These claims need to be submitted by 30 June 2019.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
We are very excited to announce that the Centre has been accepted to take part in the South Australian Collaborative Childhood Project: Re-Imagining Childhood: The Rights of children Birth – 3 years. It is a 12 month project and all of our Infant/Toddler and Prekindy Educators will be involved. The project is for teams of educators of children birth – 3 to: research the Reggio Emilia education principles within their local context, make visible how our service enacts the rights of the child as citizen from birth and to share our research locally, state-wide and nationally.
As previously mentioned, we are extremely excited as only a limited number of services are accepted to take part in this project. We look forward to sharing this journey with you all.
Regards, Dionne
INFANT/TODDLER ROOM
Shark fever has taken over the Infants and Toddlers room this month! Given our shared love for the song “Baby Shark” our room has undertaken an inquiry project into sharks. It has fast turned into somewhat of a phenomenon as we find sharks in everything that we do. It is amazing where we find sharks when we start looking for them! We have even overheard that one of our shark fanatics has started calling their own mum, Mummy Shark. We would love to share our project with you so feel free to come in and see where we are taking this exciting venture.
NAIDOC week saw our room further investigate Indigenous Australian culture. We all enjoyed the chance to listen to and celebrate Aboriginal music, create artworks using traditional colours and even lent our hand at some dot painting. This week has also provided us with the passion to set up an Indigenous area in our room, with the aim of embedding some Indigenous culture in our room each day.
This month we also donned our pyjamas for “PJ and Movie Day”. Nearly all of our friends remembered their pyjamas which made for a comfortable day. Everyone was snug as a bug when it came time to sit and watch a movie, which was ‘Shark Tale’ to fit in with our shark inquiry project. A group of children even formed an infatuation with Lisa’s dressing gown. Its soft material gathered a group of followers who towards the end of the day robbed Lisa completely of its company.
We look forward to checking back in with you next month to share more about our shark inquiry.
Kind thoughts from us all.
Tati, Lisa, Chanelle, Krystin and Heather.
PRE-KINDY ROOM
Colour Inquiry
The children have been fascinated how colour can transform when mixed together so we have been using the arts and play to continue our experimentations and explorations using primary colours. We have made some very interesting discoveries so far and we have been documenting our learning on our atelier. We will be relaunching this exciting new inquiry by exploring books that represent different colours, using paints and spray paints to mix colours and art set ups with different shades of colours. We are very curious to see where the children’s play and interests will lead their learning next!
River Torrens/NAIDOC Week Inquiry
We have continued our inquiry into the River Torrens through maps. The children have been using the arts to share their discoveries and make meaning. Through the children’s art work, we can see that the river itself and the wild life has sparked their interest and inspired them the most. To relaunch the experience, we will set up easels, drawing materials and mediums for the children to continue to create representations of their discoveries and continue our nature walks. We combined our enquiry with NAIDOC week so we had the Kaurna peoples perspectives to our learning. We have honoured that land in which we play and grow upon, celebrated it by using fallen sticks and materials in our art work/maps and researched Aboriginal women and celebrated their success’s and contributions to our community.
How we embed the rights of the child in the pre-kindy room
We believe that every child is a competent and capable learner and in this stage of the children’s development, having a strong sense of belonging and autonomy are vital for a toddler’s sense of well-being. Therefore we have been striving to embed consistent respectful practices throughout our daily routines to provide all children with the opportunity to help both themselves and their peers. You may have noticed some posters displayed around our environment that show the children being independent, please feel free to have a read to see how capable we pre-kinders are J
At times we have needed to use the Centres’ spare clothes for the children who have had accidents or engaged in messy play, etc. If you have any at home could you please return them, as our spare clothes are becoming very low? Thank you!
Bek, Kym, Paige, Stella, Vanita, Kahla & Andrea.
PRESCHOOL PROGRAM
We have had another month filled with learning and wonderment in preschool. Our curiosity and enthusiasm over lights, colours and reflection continues to expand. This is also reflected on the complexities in the way we are exploring these.
‘Pete the Cat’ series has made it to the list of our favourite literatures. This series of books are repetitive in nature and also have a song that goes with the story which children have enjoyed singing along to. We have noticed children picking up these books constantly to read it to themselves and their peers as the repetitive nature and the pictures that go with it have made it easy for them to encrypt the multimodal nature of texts. This series is also available as audio books on YouTube.
IMMUNISATION
Is your child up to date with immunisation? Remember that children who are not immunised will be excluded during any outbreak of a government scheduled preventable illness within the Centre
At preschool, we celebrated NAIDOC week themed ‘Because of her, we can’ with a range of experiences. We reflected on why we thanked the Kaurna people every morning with the help of the children’s literature ‘Sorry Sorry’ by Ann Kerr. We read several ‘dreamings’ and children used this as an opportunity to think of their own stories on how things were created. The Preschoolers also made the following art work using a range of mediums. It is the aboriginal symbol for ‘woman’ and the children decorated it with pebbles and beads.
After slowing down for a little, the nature provided the perfect provocation for our ‘bee or wasp’ inquiry. On one of our walks along the linear park, we found several hollow trees with what looked like ‘bee hotels’. On inquiring further, we found that the Adelaide council and eight other councils are working towards restoring native bees in a project called ‘Native Bees B’n’B Project’. We will be getting in touch with our local council to see ways in which we can be involved in what sounds like an amazing project.
We also met a bee/wasp during our trip and the children started debating again on whether it was a bee or a wasp, so, we will be continuing with this inquiry in Term 3.
Thank you,
Hema, Sandra, Nicole, Asmita, Renae & Nisha.
HEALTHY EATING & NUTRITION
The Centre has been looking into how to combat waste. We had a visit from the local council and KESAB to help us look more closely at our recycling habits. They have encouraged us to get some coloured bins so the children can easily recognise rubbish, recycle and organics.
They have also encouraged us to put our used paper towels into the organics bin to really make a difference. We have been recycling all our soft plastics back to Coles. I have been getting some of the Preschool children to help me take out my recycling to the bins. We talk about the colour of the bins and what needs to go into them and why. Hopefully the children will learn what needs to be recycled and why and what it means to our planet!
Thank you, Belinda
ADMINISTRATION
The transition to the new Child Care Subsidy package has had a few hiccups and we hope you will be patient while we work through this time. Some parent’s accounts are still in flux with payments and the amount of credit left from previous financial year. We hope to soon have this running smoothly.
Thank you.
Ciao, Paula