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TIMBER! Our Playground Update

Over the past year our members at TPoA Playcentre have been planning and progressing the upgrade of our outdoor area. Being a new centre (only four years old) we still had one big upgrade project on our to-do list from when we were newly constructed, and that was our playground area. Being an ECE centre we had to comply with MoE regulations and because Playcentre is run by it’s members, we had to become savvy in understanding what all the health and safety issues are. Together we decided on our priorities combining that with what we thought would benefit our children and future families for years to come.

It was at the beginning of 2018 that the planning phase now needed to progress into the action phase. Serendipitously one of our newest parents who joined at that time happened to be a professional landscaper studying his post-grad in sustainability. He quickly took over the project and has been designing and implementing appropriate changes throughout the year.

During the last school holidays we had diseased trees cut down to make room for new fruit trees that our tamariki will plant this term. Also in the new planting plan are some herbs plus various plants to deter unwanted creatures from our sandpit.

Here are some photos of the two trees coming down. We have much more sunlight coming through which has been great for these cold winter months when our children still want to play outside.

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Best ever no cook playdough recipe

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour

½ cup salt

2 Tb vegetable oil

2 Tb cream of tartar

a few drops of food colouring

1 to 1 ½ cups boiling water

Steps

Mix all dry ingredients, oil and food colouring together in a bowl.

Gradually add hot water until the dough comes together.

Sprinkle with extra flour and knead until smooth.

Here are a few playdough play ideas:

  • Use with natural materials e.g. leaves, pine cones, shells, sticks
  • Use for ‘cooking’ with rolling pins, muffin tins, bowls, cookie cutter, cutlery
  • Have a playdough tea party with friends or dolls
  • Set up a playdough factory where you make lots of…..
  • Make characters or props from a favourite story or song
  • Make imprints with whatever you have at hand
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Rockets, Robots and Space

Last term our theme was Robots and Space. That means as primary educators, we create setups and play centred around space and robots. We had a robotics engineer from The University of Auckland visit us with two child friendly robots. We created a new art wall dedicated to our space theme. And we created many exciting setups around rocket ships and planets.

Children began requesting rockets being built out of the playground cubes, junk play, card board boxes, and even at the carpentry table.

Children had shooting stars using clay balls that were hurled at easels, dipped in paint and thrown at paper, and dropped into troughs of water to see the splash

Children tried creating craters in play dough, clay, and the sand pit

We cut out circles (planets and moons) that could be used for painting or collage

We baked planet, moon and star shaped cookies and then decorated them

We read stories and children’s encyclopaedias about planets, stars, rockets, robots and astronauts

And we even role played take offs and landings in a rocket ship where we could explore moon rocks and moon people

What I loved the most was how the children took all this information and created their own water rockets that were made from plastic bottles, which had rocket boosters made from paper towel cardboard tubes, and these were used to put out fires on earth and in the sky!

It was definitely a creative and fun term

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Fire! Fire! Fire!

Wednesday 25 July 2018

Today our tamariki has a field trip to the Remuera Fire Station. The officers there had our children learning through play: exactly what we love doing at Playcentre.

We started off with a sleep game. When the smoke alarm sounded we woke up shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!” Then we crawled under “smoke” (two fire fighters made a grey tunnel) and went out to safety. They also high fived friendly fireman Dan who was fully dressed in his rescue outfit. This was to teach children that he was a safe person to go to so they don’t run away from a fire fighter in an emergency. At the end of the trip they all had a chance to play with the fire hose and sit in the truck.

Afterwards the children were still talking about their experiences. The next session we read fire fighting books and setup a fire truck in the sandpit. The children got really creative about what they could use to put out a fire including a fire engine with wings. At Playcentre we love letting their imagination lead our play. There’s no such thing as “but that doesn’t exist”. Watching the children build on each other’s input always creates more fun and greater learning.

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A Remuera Playcentre

Finding A Fit

Te Puawaitanga o Atareta Playcentre was given her name by a local matua from the Orakei Marae. Although our Playcentre is based in Remuera, we have families from surrounding neighbourhoods as well as Remuera. This includes Stonefields, Meadowbank, Kohimarama, Greenlane, Ellerslie and Orakei.

Cultural Diversity

We’re fortunate to have a wide variety of families at our Remuera based Playcentre, with many different cultures. We celebrate our own unique identity as New Zealanders and share in celebrations of migrant families.

One of our best features is our cultural diversity.

Bicultural

We continually honour New Zealand’s unique background of Maori and NZ European cultures, allowing them to blend in the most optimal way for our tamariki.

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A Playcentre session from a parent perspective

One of the things Playcentre parents are often asked is what we actually do when we’re there. Here we follow one of our newer mums (whose son is 16 months old) during a session:

9.00am

Arrive at Playcentre. This is my first session as part of the Thursday ‘duty team’ which means we need to arrive fifteen minutes before the start of session to help complete safety checks and set up some activities for when the children arrive. I sign in, put my son’s bag in a locker and set his lunchbox and drink bottle out on the kai table for when he’s ready to eat. He settles in to playing with the old telephones in the ‘shop’ set up. There is already a parent filling the  water table outside, stacking tyres and setting up the basketball hoop to provide the children with different ways they can play with a huge box of balls. Another is setting up a ‘potions’ station on the deck: two toddler-height tables covered in different containers (plastic jugs, mixing bowls, measuring cups, muffin trays…), many of which are filled with water. There are also bowls of cornflour (which makes amazing ‘goop’ when mixed with water), squeezy bottles of different coloured diluted dye and pipettes. I set up a train track on one of the tables inside and help create a farmyard set up using blocks and animals on the deck. By the time everyone arrives at 9.15am there are lots of options ready to go.

10.00am

My son loved the water play outside, we spent a lot of time filling and emptying containers together.
A lot of the water ended up on him! One of the other mums is delivering hot drinks in keep cups to the parents as they play with their children. I get my son changed once he decides to go inside, as he’s wet from head to toe. He wears clothes intended for mess to Playcentre but I’ve learned to bring two changes of clothes to each session! He’s ready for morning tea so I sit him down at the kai table with his lunchbox. One of the other children at the table is keen for some stories so she selects books from the bookshelf and I read while the children snack.

11.00am

We’re outside again and my son is playing on the outdoor equipment. Because the equipment is modular, it can be regularly reconfigured to suit a range of ages and to provide new challenges. My son isn’t ready for the ladders or monkey bars yet but there are lots of smaller boxes, mats and steps set out so he can climb up onto the big boxes and go down the slide all on his own and it’s lovely seeing how pleased with himself he is. Next to us there are children digging holes in the sandpit and filling them with water from the hoses. One of the older boys has made a plane in the carpentry area! He comes running down the ramp flying his plane and asks if we’d like to come inside to watch popcorn being made.

11.35am

It’s time to evaluate this morning’s session. Most of the children are sitting at the kai table munching on popcorn and their lunches. A parent is reading them stories related to this term’s ‘space’ theme. The other parents gather around an empty table to complete the evaluation form collaboratively. We record the types of activities used during the session and select three of the most successful to make more detailed notes about what the children did and learned. Throughout the session many of the parents have been adding to the ‘child of the day’ form, noting down what they observed him (today it’s my son) doing and we discuss this as well as what we could set up for him next time that would build on what he’s enjoying. We plan a few activities for the next Thursday session: it’s New Zealand Music Month so we’re going to play some music and get the instruments and poi out for the children, and I’m going to make playdough – my first time on session so hopefully it goes smoothly!

Once we’ve completed the evaluation, the clean up music goes on the stereo and all the parents work quickly to pack everything up and wash down the messy play area. The duty team checks that everything is turned off, packed away and locked up as it should be. Another parent bundles up the washing to take home (a few towels and tea towels). We sign out and by 12.15 my happy, exhausted little boy and I are heading home for a nap.

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Exploring 🦕 🦖 Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Hunt

On Thursday we setup a tent made of table, chairs and sheets, with the intention of creating visual sensory play ie using torches to play with light and dark. This session is proof that setups don’t usually go according to your plans but usually end up being way more fun. The children brought dinosaurs to the “tunnels” to put them to sleep and we ended up playing hide and seek with the dinosaurs under the tent. They learnt that there are rules to some games: counting to five and then coming to look for the dinos. They loved crawling into the tent to find them.

Dino Learning

One of our mum’s brought out a Dino book and asked children to find their toy dinosaur in the encyclopaedia. Then she showed them how they would defend themselves against the might T-Rex. They loved role playing scenarios with different dinosaurs and talking about how their dinosaur would defend themselves and not be eaten.

Dino Painting

One of our tamariki suggested we went back in time to when dinosaurs were first created so we went to the paint table and painted our dinosaur in our chosen colour. Afterwards, some children washed up all the dinosaurs in nice soapy water.

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The wonderful world of bugs and butterflies

Our ‘bugs and butterflies’ theme and a long, hot summer meant that we spent lots of time in the outdoors during term one. Here are a few of the things we got up to, some of which you can see in the photos below:

• LOTS of water play! Using the hose on the slide was a hit session after session.
• Trips to Potters Park (more water play!) and St John’s Bush.
• A regular ‘bug table’ where families brought in bugs they found at home for tamariki to observe and ask questions about. We had snails, praying manti, crickets, a cicada…. and on the last day of term a monarch butterfly caterpillar made its chrysalis right on the railing of our deck!
• Stories, dumpling-making, and playdough to celebrate Chinese New Year.
• A hunt for hand-painted treasures, making and painting clay eggs, and shared hot cross buns to celebrate Easter.
• Enjoying our new outdoor equipment: a huge sun umbrella and monkey bars.
• Welcoming four new families to our centre.