Jacob's Hen

As well as our highland dancers Jacob brought in his bantam hen with her eggs.
One by one we were able to watch during the day as they hatched out in their nest, closely protected by mother hen.
Thanks Rachel, Nick and Jacob.

Highland dancers visit

With our interest in dance and Charlotte's interest in highland dance in particular we took advantage of school holidays arriving to invite two highland dancers to kindergarten.



At first I thought our dancers wouldn't be able to make it, one had had a temperature the night before and the other a nasty fall off a swing frame, I'd told them we'd be okay, but they really wanted to be here and to my pleasant surprise they both trooped in and even did a performance at Lakeview Kindergarten for their brother first.



Annabelle started us off with three dances.

Then Bridget took over and danced us through the rest of their repertoire non stop. Bridget was worn out after all that so Annabelle came back out to instruct the children in highland dance. We were all impressed by her kind, caring, supportive and positive manner, she'll make a lovely dance teacher.

Charlotte's friend Piper has been giving Charlotte tips.

We learnt boys can do highland dance too.

Annabelle helped us learn to squash the bug and to balance.

Dance and music help build mathematical patterns in the brain.

After some individual coaching Annabelle taught the children how to space themselves out with their arms and we all tried it with the music.

We got better and better and even Jo and I had a go.

Beautiful Beetle

We found this gorgeous beetle near our light trap.
If you held him in your fingers he would bite. He happily nipped away at my finger nail as I demonstrated this so no one would try.
Then I demonstrated the correct way to hold him, by letting him walk on you.
He was an up beetle. Some insects like to go up, some like to go down, he liked to go up.
After he'd walked on me for a while the children overcame their fears and had the courage to hold him too, soon he had quite a queue.
Eventually he got tired of playing with us and flew off to the Christmas tree. Passing him over.

Walking him hand to hand.

Up the arm and onto the hand again.

Have a go Jo.

Your turn Jack.

Caleb demonstrates how to hold him for a new budding photographer learning how to use the camera.

More Dancing

Not all the dancing pictures I wanted, some seem to have been lost, but here's some more of the dancing this time with Grace, Caleb, Katy and Meadow mainly, and some shots of us reviewing the youtube ballets. Caleb seems to have a heavy crumping influence on his style, and possibly some hulk, which all adds to our knowledge of dance literacy.

Christmas dough

Our playdough looked very festive this week.

Dancers

With many of our children in Julie's dance recital , they've been practising flat tack. Last week they kept coming up and asking for dance music, I offer them a range of options as always from Billy Idol and Celtic bagpipes to Swan lake. Today's choice was Nutcracker (hope I got that right, might be some swan lake in there to.) Together we explored the literacy of dance. I'm a firm believer that everyone should dance, boys and girls, grown ups and kids, even if I must admit I laugh when I see myself up there, it's fun.

As the week went by our group continued to grow, with boys too, we also watched some great ballet dancers, male and female, on line on youtube. (Including our favourite Chinese acrobatic group dancing swan lake.)

We dance all the time at Hunter Park, but we certainly danced a lot last week. More video to come featuring some highland dance and more. I've also invited some highland dancers this week to come in and show us some moves on Thursday.

This video from the 17th features Grace, Gina, Charlotte, Elise, Eden, a little of Billie, Meadow and Kaitlyn Jo and a strange huge dancing butterfly or possibly caterpillar, we call crash for obvious reasons.

MUD

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

More Party animals

Christmas Party

Where shall we have our Christmas party? Well we knew we wanted a helicopter, maybe one could land at kindy amongst the trees and powerlines? Well maybe the school, not allowed due to regs, okay pity we can't have it at the aerodrome.

Why not, you can use our hanger.

Perfect, so off we went to see the planes.It was a great venue, big planes to look at, trucks and even two model planes buzzing around.

You launch them like this.

Santa came.

We wore beautiful costumes.

It was a great evening for the whole family to come to.

And to catch up with all the growing babies.

Our retiring Education manager
Liz made the trip over from Hastings with her husband Peter.
Cindy Berry one of our association's board members and a member of our local community came out as well.

Meanwhile the mums got busy preparing the food, no space left for any husbands to help, hmm I wonder who...err what they're talking about, well they seem to be laughing at something ;).

And here's the dad's cooking up the sausages.

More and more people kept coming making this one of our biggest and best Christmas parties ever.

Lots of space to park, and space to play infront of the hanger.

It was great to see the familiar faces of lots of our former pupils.

So we sat amongst the planes to enjoy our shared tea.

We have very loving, kind, sharing children.

Olivia wanted a picture of her brother, I don't think she realised he was already in one.

Then in came Santa in his helicopter.

Our sterling piper Louis, piped him in.

Sorry about the sound quality, much better live.

Time for requests and presents. Don't I know you?

And then came the singing.

Brilliant.

The paparazzi were there of course. :)

and who can blame them with stars like these.