To all our 2025 families – welcome to our first centre Newsletter for 2025! We have had quite a busy few weeks as the year got underway but are really enjoying getting to know our new students. A big thank you to each of you for all your work getting students ready for preschool, ensuring they have the things they need each day and for your patience with us as we rolled out our new digital platform – Xplor.

Over the last few weeks each of the classes have focused on providing students with plenty of opportunities to play and explore in their new preschool environment, with lots of time to build connections with their teachers and classmates. It has been lovely to watch friendships begin to blossom and to see children enjoying the play space! With the warmer weather students have spent lots of time in the creek area and around the mud kitchen – enjoying opportunities to include lots of water in their play.

Each of the classes have spent time introducing the students to the different spaces around our centre and the rules for different spaces, such as where bikes are allowed to go, how many children can visit the chooks or where shoes go if we take them off. The children are doing a great job settling into these routines and expectations that will set us up for a fun year together. The children have been learning about the important things to bring with them to preschool each day, through some class soft toys and a shared story book. Our toys have been showing us how we can have fun and enjoy our day at school through remembering to come each day with helping hands, listening ears, walking feet and kind hearts.

We have also spent time getting to know our Preschool pets – our four chickens and Mopsy & Cottontail our rabbits. The children have learnt about caring for the pets and how to be gentle and respectful towards the animals when we visit their coop or let the chickens have a wander around the playground. There has also been a little bit of time spent in the Vegie Patch – discovering some of the herbs and vegies planted there, trying the odd cherry tomato (not everyone is keen on tomatoes!) and picking some spinach to cook into delicious spinach and cheese triangles.

All of the children have been very excited to go on some visits to the big school for library lessons. The Bilbies and Koalas class visit the library on Mondays and the Possums on Fridays. Ms Smith, the library teacher, loves our visits and always does a fantastic job reading a story to everyone as part our visit. The Koalas and Possums classes were also very excited to catch the bus to St Anthony’s Church last Friday for a mass with the Primary School.

We were very excited this week to be visited by Bill and Ivan from the Men’s Shed group based in Hughes. These gentlemen have kindly constructed a play bus for our students to enjoy in the playground. All items in the bus have been rescued from landfill and upcycled into this fun addition to our playground. A very big thank you to Miss Emma was well, for all her work with sourcing the items for this and for liasing with the Men’s Shed to set up its construction! The students are loving this space for imaginative play!!

A Few Reminders

• Please remember to label all items of clothing and children’s lunch containers. This is a big help to us and makes it so much easier to reunite students with missing items!
• Only put lunch containers with items that require refrigeration in the baskets in classrooms. Containers should be taken out of cooler bags etc as we have limited room in the fridge ?. All morning tea things and lunch foods that don’t require refrigeration can stay in children’s lockers.