COMMUNITY FRUIT 

Thanks everyone for all your support with our Community Fruit Break. We have had an abundance of different kinds of fruits and vegetables to share with the students during fruit break each day. The children are very excited to have a go at helping to cut up the fruit. To help build cutting skills the students are just cutting soft fruits at the moment, with staff cutting up things like apples and carrots prior to fruit break. When it comes time to eat, the students really enjoy being responsible and choosing when they are going to have their fruit break and the fruits that they will eat that morning.

During our community lunch time on Wednesday, we asked the students for ways we could make fruit break even better and got some great suggestions. JR suggested we get some circle mats for the children to sit on so they could sit around the mat and chat more. VW asked us to have a big mat and some small mats so they could choose to sit with a big group or a small group. We are going to purchasing some circle mats to follow up the student’s suggestions and help make our fruit break more of a time to chat ?!

We love our Preschool pets – the chickens and our rabbits! They bring lots of joy to the students and are a great way for our students to learn about empathy and caring for others. As the children have been settling into preschool routines, each of the classes have spent time learning about the chickens and rabbits. The students are encouraged to be quiet and gentle around our animals. Those who feel comfortable enough, are taught how to hold the animals, and we ask the students to always be sitting when they hold the chickens and rabbits at preschool. Some of the classes have been thinking about pets and what their idea of a perfect pet would be – even drawing their own perfect pets!

We are working on ways to embed lots of rich learning into the children’s experiences with the pets at preschool. We provide opportunities for students to learn about the needs of living things and our interconnectedness with the natural world. We spend time looking at stories about pets, and provide opportunities to draw, paint, sculpt and otherwise represent our pets. We collect our food scraps to give to the chickens each day – reducing our food waste at preschool. The students help to collect the eggs from the chickens and we use these eggs in cooking experiences. We also use straw from our chicken coop as mulch for our vegie gardens. We hope through these kinds of experiences we encourage students to care for the plants and animals in their environment.