Personally, I loved Kay’s home-made ones!

You may have noticed that we used a heavy duty cardboard to ensure that we didn’t have too many damaged works of art!

Just beautiful! The children enjoyed experimenting with the variety of ‘lines’ achievable with the pens and some began to create visual representations such as these lovely stick figures above.

Here is a link to some inspirational art work from Vivienne Nelson using bamboo pen techniques. Enjoy!

A can of shaving foam is a wonderous thing for a preschool child. Witnessing the white ‘fluffiness’ ooze and expand its way out of the tiny hole in the can’s spray nozzle is an impressive sight.  Make sure you let the children do it by themselves, they will love it! The temptation to plunge little fingers into it’s smooth and silky texture is irresistible.  Adding some tempera powder paint to the experience encourages the children to experiment with colour mixing.

Rainbows of colour appear through the foam and are whirled and swirled across the tray. The children can make their own colour selections and formulate their own hypotheses regarding what colours might result from their vigorous mixing.

Or maybe they might just like to play with their favourite colour, in this case, yellow!

Adding different implements and tools can allow for different ways of mixing and mark making (but they can become quite difficult to find once covered in foam!)

Mmmmm, it actually looks quite yummy!

Yellow and Red make Orange!

It feels so good squeezing through little fingers!

Guaranteed to create …

‘s!

The books displayed here in these photographs cost me between au$1 and au$2.  To purchase them new, would cost between au$12 to au$18.

We have used these op’ shop purchases to form the back bone of our CHILDREN’S LIBRARY.  This is a library that allows the children to borrow books on a weekly basis to take home and share with their parents and family. In the past we have found that we can generally expect to lose between 3-6 books annually through providing this experience for the children. As a ‘not for profit’ organization, resources are precious and any loss is disappointing. So we have found the use of second-hand books in this instance to be very cost effective.

Library day is a much anticipated and exciting day for the children.

They are able to select a book to take home in their very own special library bag.

 The children are free to select a book independently but staff do offer the children a little information about books that they show an interest in to help them with their selection.

So why do we think it is so important to send books home with the children? Well here are 12 very good reasons!

12 REASONS WHY PARENTS SHOULD READ TO THEIR CHILDREN:

1. For companionship, pleasure and the enjoyment of time spent together
2. Because when they are held and given attention, they know they are loved
3. To help children understand themselves and their wider world
4. To catch the particular moment when a child is interested in learning more
5. To spark their curiosity and imagination
6. To promote story-telling and pretend play
7. So that they can absorb the language of literature making it easier for them to read it later on
8. To discover how writers write
9. To help find information and answer questions
10. To develop positive attitudes towards reading and a love of books
11. Because the illustrations in children’s books often rank with the best, giving them a life-long feeling for good art
12. Because children’s books today are so good that they are fun for adults too

To help us along with the ‘relaxing’ process, we are generally inundated with gifts from our very generous families at the end of each year, and 2011 was no exception.  As is usually the case, this years bounty included some lovely pampering potions and creams that the girly side of me just loves to indulge in!  Who has time for a relaxing bubble bath during the working year, right?

One of our lovely parents gave me two bottles of shower gel, ‘Plum’ and ‘Pineapple’.  And one morning, as I put them to good use, I was drawn to reading the print upon the labels:

“Memory #12:  Remember when you first discovered that pineapples don’t just come tinned and sliced in pieces?  It was high summer, pineapples were in season and the green grocer had just received a delivery. Mum put it on the table, got out the big knife and sliced you the biggest, juiciest, freshest slice you have ever tasted. Bliss! Sweet, juicy, delicious!  Now to attack your brother with the left over pointy end!”

“Memory #23:  I think I have found the perfect one. Round, deeply coloured, slightly squishy.  Ready, aim, FIRE! It releases in slow motion as it arches out of the home-made sling-shot and hits smack in the centre, SPLAT! I can smell the ripe succulent juices from here behind the bush. BULLS EYE! Now, turn and run before you get caught.”

Thank you Stacey, your gifts certainly hit the mark!  BULLS EYE!

Immediately, my thoughts returned to one of my favourite quotes:

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colours are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

 ~ Elizabeth Lawrence

How often as adults, when confronted with a familiar sensory input, whether it be taste, touch, sight, feel or sound, are we carried back to a fond childhood memory, possibly your first ever encounter with that particular sensory input. Without doubt, our first experiences are profound, indelible and securely etched within the deep recesses of our brain, ready to be triggered by subsequent encounters. How could these current experiences ever be ‘more fragrant’ than those captured in our childhood memories?

Having not long read Richard Louv’s “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER”,  and recently connecting with some lovely childhood friends (thank you FB), the messages printed on these bottles of goodness really resonated with me. At that point, in the shower, I new that this post had to happen! As we all know, our best thinking, and singing for that matter, always happens whilst in the shower!  I think it must be due to the wonderful regenerative powers of water!

So, here we are, childhood friends of old. Well, perhaps not that old!  Today, from left to right; me, Karen and Leonie.  And back then, left to right; me, Leonie and Karen.

Leonie and I, Christmas 1967.

Of course I had no less than 4 Karen’s in my class through primary school, which had a lot to do with that cute, youngest member of the Mickey Mouse Club, who was also called Karen! Sad to say, but I can still sing the theme song from that show!

We had a rich and blessed childhood really, but certainly not in the material sense that some parents are misguidedly lead to believe is necessary today. The media and advertisers were no where to be seen back then, unable to employ their ‘guilt’ tactics to brainwash unsuspecting parents as to what good parenting was/is (the underlying truth of their message being to line the pockets of multi-national toy companies). We grew up in a suburb of Melbourne, called Ashburton, but on the poorer ‘housing commission’ side of High Street. We had our share of rough and tumble families living in amongst the poky little houses that lined the streets, but mostly, it was a warm and friendly neighbourhood.

My parents married very young (18 and 22). Dad headed off to join the navy at about 17, and did not settle into completing his tertiary studies in engineering until he was in his 20′s. As was the tradition in those day’s, our Mum was a stay at home Mum. Everyday she cared for 4 young children and tackled a mountain of household duties (as well as hand-making all of our clothes!) without the luxury appliances that assist us today. But Mum was a hard worker and very proud of her home. As Leonie recently reminded me, it was always immaculate.  So, during my childhood, the six of us lived in a very small, two bedroom housing commission home, with available floor space amounting to little more than the surface of a postage stamp. With space at a premium, it was inevitable for us, that all play would take place outside. The house was viewed by us (and Mum!) as somewhere that we returned to at intermittent punctuation’s throughout the day to eat, bathe and sleep. We were often lured to the back door by the lovely cooking aromas that wafted across the verandah, down the stairs and into our back garden, where they would dance around our noses tantalising our nostrils. Eventually, no matter how engaging the play may have been, our tummies would grumble and the aromas could no longer be ignored! Mum would throw open the wire screen door and call us in with, ‘Tea Time!’, that is of course, if ours legs had not already set themselves in motion.

MEMORIES OF A LIFE OUTDOORS:

Here is just a sprinkling of some of my childhood memories.

• THE CHOOK YARD:  At the very end of our backyard was an area designated as ‘the chook yard’. The reason why this particular patch of ground was so named remained a mystery to me throughout my childhood, for as far back as I could remember, not a hen nor rooster had ever been sited within it’s confines.  But for us, it was an amazing and magical hidden oasis. A place where we could create whatever came into our imaginations. We built cubby houses from wooden packing crates and tea chests, and modeled our own mud-pie kitchens. We dug holes, built mountains and created tracks for cars and trucks. Occasionally, Dad would decide to do a big rubbish burn-off and the chook yard would be set aglow with an enormous bon-fire! Clearly not a recommended practice today. It was here that Leonie and I decided that the stamen of the Calla Lily must have been the source of a well known Australian treat known as ‘Twisties’. But of course  as soon as we bit into it’s bright yellowness, our taste buds immediately informed us of our gross misunderstanding. Only a quick trip to our neighbour Mrs O’Meara’s kitchen for one of her yummy ‘cream puffs’  could restore our mouths to some semblance of normality.
• FLOWER LEMONADE:  A weekly event through summertime in our neighbourhood was the delivery of orders from the ‘Loys lemonade’ truck. The ‘Loy’s man’ would place colourful bottles of lemonade in wooden crates on our front verandah which we would cheerfully empty for him over the course of the week. We would then return the clinking empty bottles and crates to the verandah for the following weeks change over. But on one occasion, Leonie and I seized upon the idea of making our own lemonade with the aid of the empty bottles and copious amounts of flowers from Mum’s garden. We collected a variety of flowers of different hues and mashed their petals into a paste. Then we added water and poured the liquids into the awaiting bottles. In this instance, we had become a little more discerning and refrained from consuming the contents of the bottles, but we did agree that the colours were spectacular and Mum was enormously pleased with our efforts!
• STORY TELLING: My brother and I found that our best story telling was accomplished perched up high on top of our garage roof. From this vantage point, we could see the landscape of suburban Melbourne out-stretched before our eyes. To ascend to this lofty height required the careful negotiation of a fence climb to the roof of the garden shed, then the application of the ‘jump-cling-hoist’, manoeuvre to secure a well earned roof top position. Here we could sit for what seemed like an eternity creating implausible anecdotes regarding the events taking place in the world around us. On one such occasion, as the day was drawing to a close and the street lights began to dot the landscape, we launched into a story about the ‘baddies’ who lived at a location distinguished only by a particularly bright shining light. Leonie and Lisa were with us on this occasion, and when we were called in for dinner these two sufficiently terrified children were unable to set foot off our back verandah for fear of the baddies. We were admonished by our mother for our particularly ‘good’ story telling and my older sisters were subsequently enlisted to escort the wide eyed, shaken children to their respective homes. Unfortunately not long after this incident, our garage story telling came to an abrupt end when my brothers friend Gary, completed a Tarzan style jump from the top of the garage down onto the shed roof, and failed to stop at the desired point of contact.  He rather awkwardly continued to fall straight through making firm contact with the shed floor below. A gaping wound was created in the roof of that rustic little building on that day, for which we rather unconvincingly assured our parents that we had no knowledge of the events surrounding it’s demise.
• BILLIE CARTS: Another use we found for the wooden packing crates that came our way was the construction of state of the art Billie Carts. The street on which we lived had a gradient significant enough to produce reckless, break-neck speeds from one corner of the block to the next. And pity anyone who chose to amble along the footpath when our Billie Carts were in action! Breaks were not an optional extra on our extraordinarily fine machines! When approaching the end of the journey, preparation for the quick right hand turn was of paramount importance. Fear WAS the enemy. Unfortunately, there were ample occasions when slight hesitation resulted in this particular action being performed less elegantly than desired so that the Billie Cart successfully negotiated the turn minus it’s passenger. Inertia guaranteed this poor child a brutal slide across concrete and bitumen. Trousers with holes in them were sent to the sewing basket and injured body parts were dabbed with mercurochrome at the back door step before the patient was sent away with the less than encouraging sentiment of, ‘go on then, you’ll be right, off you go!’
• ADVENTURES AT MY GRANDPARENTS HOUSE: Trips to my grandparents house in Aspendale were always an excursion met with great anticipation and excitement.  All sorts of fun could be had in their garden and my cousins, Tracey and Rikki, lived just around the corner. Three girls, with a mere two years separating us in age, engaged in the most wonderful imaginative play together. Our favourite location was at the far end of the back garden where three large willow trees reached skyward creating a lime green canopy above our heads. We each had lay claim to our own special tree that we would agilely scale to find our self designated comfortable nook to nestle down within. Our voices would drift on the breeze carrying our thoughts through the gently swaying leafy tendrils that floated like curtains between us.  Every now and then we would catch a glimpse of each other, but mostly it was just us and our tree, responding to whispers on the wind. By way of contrast, the front garden was always impeccably manicured with an explosive and colourful display of annuals meticulously cared for by my grandfather. When he wasn’t watching, we secretively loved to pop the snap-dragons! A fish pond adorned the middle of the garden and provided a home for several large goldfish. Upon our constant nagging, our grandmother would ultimately relent and give each one of us an arrowroot biscuit to feed the fish. We would sit together on the grass surrounding the pond and careful pinch our biscuits into tiny crumbs and scatter them bit by bit on the surface of the water. To our delight, the fish would tentatively appear from the depths and nibble away at the crumbs we provided. On one particular occasion I was able to get to know the fish a little more intimately than they may well have appreciated. On a beautiful spring day, we were all playing in the front garden as our grandparents and parents sat chatting on the verandah.  My grandfathers front lawn was a type of grass that had a particularly spongy, springy texture to it, and lent itself  just perfectly to a game of roly-poly! Unfortunately, to much giggly roly-poly resulted in me becoming a little dizzy and disorientated and rolling myself straight into the murky waters with my fishy friends. Startled by what he had witnessed, my grandfather immediately exclaimed to my father that his youngest daughter had just disappeared into the fish pond! My father casually trained his gaze toward the pond and reassured my grandfather that there was no need for concern, all would be okay, as I was in fact, a mighty fine swimmer!   And of course he was right. I emerged from the pond unscathed, but sadly the lovely white frock that my mother had dressed me in (what was she thinking?) had turned a lovely shade of green due to the combine assault from grass stains and pond slime.  I spent the rest of the day attempting to keep up with the antics of my cousins in an over-sized cardigan borrowed from my grandmothers wardrobe.

 ‘THE fish pond!’

•  MACK AND JACK: It was Christmas 1967 that Santa delivered the most wonderful scooters imaginable to my brother and I. My brother’s was a flashy fire engine red machine and mine was cool blue with bright yellow wheels. A significant difference in colour, that inspired the game known only to my brother and I as, ‘Mack and Jack”.  It was a serious game, as we were very important defenders of the community.  Mack, my brother, on his red scooter was a fireman, and Jack, me on my blue and yellow scooter, took on the role of local police officer. Mack’s fire station was located in the front yard at the letterbox, and Jack’s police station was in the back yard near the garden tap, sometimes barely visible between the Hydrangea’s and Fuchsia’s. Mack and Jack would rondezvous equal distance from their respective stations, determine their plan of action, and set off purposefully to uphold the law and protect members of the community from impending danger.

Please feel free to leave a comment regarding some of your favourite childhood memories.  I would love to hear from you.

WORDS TO INSPIRE IN 2012:

To Have Succeeded

To laugh often and love much
To win the respect of intelligent people
And the affection of children
To earn the approbation of honest critics
And endure the betrayal of false friends
To appreciate beauty
To find the best in others
To give one’s self
To leave the world a little better
Whether by a healthy child
A garden patch
Or redeemed social condition
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm
And sung with exultation
To know even one life has breathed easier
Because you have lived…
This is to have succeeded.

(Ralph Waldorf Emerson)

I HOPE THAT 2012 BRINGS HAPPINESS AND JOY TO ALL!

The preschool that I work in is a ‘stand alone’, ‘not for profit’  incorporated association, governed by a parent committee of management.  We receive some funding from our state government, which barely covers staff wages, and the balance of our income comes from parent fees and fundraising.

So, it pays to be resourceful under such circumstances!  For me, this is not difficult.  I love rummaging through second-hand stores, Opportunity shops, for useful resources.

In one such trip to a local store, this is what I found….

Nine great books in excellent condition for between (Au) $1 to $2 each!

This big bag of magnetic construction pieces for (Au) $7!  It will compliment a small set that we already have, which not surprisingly, was significantly more expensive purchased new through an educational supplier.

And, these lovely little wooden sea-life threading beads for (Au) $2!

Total cost, (Au) $24!  Now that’s what I call a bargain!

An additional benefit exists within this practice, embodied in the spirit of ‘recycling’.  It does feel great to give items discarded by others a new lease of life.

We also pick up a large proportion of  our art supplies from Resource Rescue to support and enhance our program.

So, may I say…

Happy Hunting!

It was truly awesome to be nominated in the ‘best new blog’ category in the ‘Edublog Awards’ this year, but not for my own personal glory, so to speak. For me, it is all about contributing and collaborating with the EC community to help create and promote the ‘best’ learning environments we can for the children within our care.  To achieve this requires teamwork and learning from each other.  If my readers feel that I have helped them out on their own personal journey, then that is reward enough for me.

I would like to wish all of my readers, where ever you are, a wonderful Christmas holiday break.  I hope you are surrounded by loved ones in happiness and in joy!   Stay safe, and I hope to see you all again on the ‘flip-side’!

Cheers

Karen xo

In this activity, we provided the children with trays of coloured sand and a variety of vessels and utensils.

Preschoolers move through several stages as they use ‘hands-on’ experimentation to explore the concept of volume. Initially,  they begin by imitating the actions of older children or adults as they pour substances from one container to another.  As they play, they begin to talk about ‘too much’, ‘not enough’, it’s over flowing’, ‘I need more’… etc.

Then, they start to make comparisons, ‘more/less’, ‘bigger/smaller’, ‘taller/shorter’… and so on.

Following on from this, the children begin to use ‘arbitrary units’ of measurement.  That is, anything that the child has at hand can become a unit of measurement.  For example, They will try to find out, ‘How many spoonfuls of sand will fill the bowl?’ or ‘How many cups will fill the jug?’

Of course they will eventually go on to school and begin to develop an understanding of the need for ‘standard units’ of measurement.  By then, hopefully having had plenty of experience ‘playing’ and experimenting with measurement, they will be better equipped to grasp an understanding of the concept of measurement in all it’s forms.

And let’s not forget, that as children work alongside and communicate with each other, they are extending and developing new vocabulary relating to their experiences.

Learning can be, and should be, great fun!

We used some firm cream cardboard and a glue stick to help the salt adhere to the surface.  The children spread salt onto their cardboard using a spoon and gave it a shake to remove any excess.

Then, using their favourite ‘potion’ bottles, the children began experimenting and exploring the reaction between the salt and coloured water droplets.

As we know, it is really is ALL about the process, BUT gosh these final works of art are truly spectacular!

Don’t you agree!

This is an activity we did with the children in spring as they began to notice the flowers appearing in our garden.  The cut end of celery, when used for printing, makes a gorgeous representation of the layered petals you might see in some flowers, particularly the rose.

We watched the children’s facial expressions closely as they began to print and an image was revealed on the hessian.  First came a look of surprise that gradually transformed into an expression of recognition…  sometimes followed by a ‘knowing smile’ and sometimes followed by the exclamation, “A flower!”

I could see this activity being done on calico with pastel colours too… very pretty!