After our beautiful Winter Festival and happy holidays, our Hummingbee Kindies returned refreshed to a garden filled with Dancing Daffodils, and veggie gardens bursting with fresh ingredients for our baking days... One of our favourites was potatoes baked in our fire pit. We collected wood on an exciting walk to the Big School, prepared our toppings of herbs and grated cheese and wrapped the potatoes for the fire dancers to bake. Another was Afghani filled flat bread Bolani Katchalu... rolling dough, chopping potatoes and silver beet and herbs, filling and cooking in our outdoor restaurant kitchen in the frying pan.

For Book Week we dressed up from our baskets of silks and muslins, and even used our finger-knitting to dress up as characters from our Kindy stories... Bobber Blue Wren, Jingle Jangle Jellyfish, Flutterby Butterfly and many more. The children loved being a part of it. We watched the Primary School parade with interest and delight.

The children have been enjoying putting on shows for each other, re-telling our stories and creating their own. We are all learning quickly how to be good audience members!

Our busy fingers have been weaving our finger-knitting to make the beautiful rainbow shell of Grandmother Shellyback Turtle.

We've been enjoying the sunshine with extra outside play, making cubbies, obstacle courses, and learning new group games. Some favourites are Puddledock Farm, Ultimate Tips and Hide and Sneak. Our mud pit has seen many alterations... including speed bumps, trenches, pipe laying, form work and concreting. It's always a hive of activity with our big garden trolleys out collecting gravel, timber, pipes, mulch and furniture for cubby building!

We continue to extend our skills on the monkey bars - backwards, twisting and turning, skipping bars, and combinations of all three, as well as practicing balancing and hopping for hopscotch.

Our guinea pigs, Daisy and Jasmine are enjoying their new home, and caring for them is a focus every day, with the children lovingly picking fresh greens, filling their water bowl, cleaning out their home and putting in fresh straw for their bedroom and, of course, lots of cuddles!

This week, we are looking forward to our first class outing, to see Wink Blink Lighthouse and watch out for Wash Wallow Whale and his family. Next week we have our Spring Festival to end the term with song and dance, flower crowns and a feast for morning tea before our next happy holidays.

Joanne Owens
Kindergarten Teacher

Spring has sprung and the children are full of enthusiasm. Our silkworms are growing rapidly and need fresh leaves and a cleaned box every day. Ren decided to hammer some air holes into the lid and, despite his initial reluctance to use the big ‘grandfather hammer’, he managed it it very well and showed great determination and hand-eye coordination.

Sahara is showing our silkworms to her Grandma Kay, who lives in New Zealand and has never seen them before. Everyone joins in cleaning out the box, showing great care and gentleness when handling our little pets.

I brought in my spinning wheel and some parents gave it a go while others watched on. It does take a bit of practise to master!

Some of the children got very excited about making a Fathers' Day card and the table had to be moved into the middle of the room to fit them all in.

Finally, it was time to sit down for songs, stories and juicy fruit. We always have a great team of helpers getting the table ready for morning tea and serving the fruit.

Nixie, Winter, Leilei and Ivy are cleaning the table after making our crunchy buns, with lots of bubbles to make our table sparkle and shine. What a busy morning we've had have and now it is time to rest.

Carina Halliday
Playgroup Coordinator

The children in Antoinette's group (pictured above) have been making and baking, listening to stories and going for walks. We use our imagination to create our play together, whilst we take care of our environment. Getting muddy is fun as we help in the garden. Making juice is one of our favourite things to do on the verandah. We love working and playing together and having lots of fun.

Craig d'Arcy
Preschool Coordinator

​After a beautiful Winter Festival at Birdsong Kindy, the children have enjoyed a long rest and many adventures over the holidays, and have come back with a spring in their steps. At the end of last term we planted brown bulb babies into pots, and there was much delight as the returning Birdsong children were greeted with golden daffodils.

So far this term our stories and songs have been focused around ‘Winter in the Bush’, and each child has blanket stitched a wattle blossom cape to make their own gumnut forest friend.

Mother Earth, Sunny Sun and the Rain Dancers have all been helping our plants in the veggie patch to grow tall.  In the warm winter sunshine the children are harvesting beans, snow peas, and other yummy herbs and vegetables.
 
Kara Mallory
Kindergarten Assistant

Winter is well and truly here - a time to turn inwards to find our own inner light and warmth. We hope all of our Preschool families are enjoying this time of candlelight and warm fires at night, with gentle, nourishing stories for the children. Eating delicious warming foods as we rug up and keep our feet snuggled into woolly socks and slippers.
 
At Preschool, all of our children have celebrated the longest night – with each group holding their own Winter Festival. In readiness for our festivals, the children have been involved in preparing apple crumbles and pumpkin soups to share. We have been busy making gnome hats, lanterns and candles and practising our songs and our 'Lantern Spiral’, a symbol of the inward reflection that is marked by the longest night and an opportunity to help create a rhythm of quiet inwardness in the children.
 
As well as the lantern walk, another important part of our winter festivals are the special songs that we practise and sing at this time of year. The following are two of our favourites:

Winter is here, in our Kindy garden, and we are all enjoying our work and play in the winter sunshine. We sing songs of King Winter, sleeping seeds, golden glowing mandarin trees, and Mother Earth and her Helpers. 

As well as getting started with our preparations for our Kindy Winter Festival, the Birdsong children have been busy making their own set of wings! Each child coloured their own wings and finger knitted their straps. Our wings turn us into dragons, butterflies, dragonflies, eagles, magpies, sugar gliders and all sorts of flying and gliding creatures.  Special thanks to the Kindy parents who kindly offered to help us with the overlocking of our wings.

Kat Barwick
Kindergarten Teacher

We don’t often have a chance to experience the simplicity of inner stillness in full consciousness. Winter is a time to look within and reflect on our lives and gather for the next year. To ensure your children experience this mood of soul here are a few possible suggestions to continue the mood into your home life:
 
• Create a quiet family ritual that you enact each year on the longest night.
 
• When you arrive for the Winter Festival in your car, ensure the radio is turned off for a quiet ride home.
 
• After the festival, go home and share a meal by candlelight. Immerse yourselves in a rich peace and quiet. Prepare the meal during the day so that you don’t have to turn on any electric lights.
 
• Have the whole family at home - no sleep-overs - for the longest night.
 
• Light candles instead of turning on the electric lights.
 
• Have a family campfire and go to bed early.
 
• Wake up early in time to watch the sun rise on the new year ahead.
​

Below are the words of our new Winter Festival song, composed by Lisa Cameron and written by Liz Kee.

With the cooler winds blowing and Old Man Winter about, some children gravitate to more inside play where the heaters are keeping our cottage toasty warm. In the pictures above (clockwise from top), Mercury has built the biggest ‘dragon’ we have ever seen out of the blocks. Pippa is ‘telling us a story’ with our new story pieces, hand felted by Quinn’s and Neela’s Mum Karuna. Shearwater graduate and playgroup parent, Cobberty, shows us how to finger-knit the fastest way. Raffaella and Ayla are experiencing the colours carmine and ultramarine, which together make many shades of purple. Elara and Taloe are using the same colors and creating their own unique tones.

Ren has a handle on the nutcracker and is helping the younger children to get a macadamia nut out of its hard shell. Raffaella is collecting some flowers in the garden, but not too many, as the busy bees will need flowers to make honey, particularly over the winter months. Ren and Taloe are and enjoying a leisurely swing and keeping ‘warm’ wrapped up in the hammock (kindly donated by Susan).

Warmly,
Carina Halliday
Playgroup Coordinator

At Humming Bee Kindy we celebrated our beautiful Autumn Festival at the end of last term, sharing songs and dances with our families, and enjoying a feast together. Our Sunny Sunflowers reached for the Sun and grew as tall as our roof!

This term we have done lots of work in our garden, harvesting sunflower seeds to nibble and to share with the birds who visit our garden, and watched as our watermelons grew bigger and bigger, until we harvested them this week.

Bobber Blue Wrens have been nesting in our ever-growing garden and raised their family of babies, who even came to our lunch table to find crumbs to eat. We have just started planting vegetables in our veggie gardens, and are busy going around and around making rainbow pompoms to decorate our tie-dyed craft bags. Father Sky has sent many autumn rainbows to arch over our beautiful Kindy home.