Ollie's walking creature.

Happy World Teacher Day

It's world Teacher day today, Sharon made a cake. But Sally had already thought of us and made us a ginger slice.

Meanwhile a special secret polystyrene package turned up from the association.

Poor Adrianne, she's away and missed it all. They all look amazing, you'll have to ask Sharon and Jo how it all tasted though, as I'm avoiding processed sugar and gluten.

Guess what happened after the children left!

White out.

Water Javelins

Our rocket pump died, so we decided just to thow them.
They'd fly better if the ends were heavier Adrianne suggested. So we soaked the foam tips in water and threw them, then they really flew. Anna really liked dipping hers.

With only four to throw we had to take turns so we formed two teams and threw them back and forth to each other, developing rules such as "the team who threw it can't retrieve it" as we went.

BDK Balloons

Having seen a great idea for surplus balloons on the BDK blog last month, when we found ourselves with spare balloons we thought we'd have a go too.

We piled on more and more but it just wouldn't blow.So we added Adrianne!
Still no bang. Jack thought maybe if we jumped on the table, so Adrianne and I held the legs and Jack jumped. Three big jumps, no bang.

So we lifted off the table and tried our feet, but the balloons just squeezed out.

So we all stopped and I body surfed the balloons. Suddenly all the children piled on top on me and used me for a surf board. ( But still no pop.) Then Adrianne found something sharp! Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

We finished off the rest of the balloons with out fingers.

My Two Brothers

Children's Photo's.

We should take photography lessons from children. Jack took this photo I think.

Skyping into PD

We tried to skype into a professional development workshop in Dannevirke today. (One we were already up on so it didn't matter if it didn't work.) The idea was to see if skype could be used to save travel when attending meetings and workshops.

A big thankyou to the Dannevirke kindergartens and the ICT cluster for letting us look in.

We managed to get the link up, with one phone call to add a new contact as our established ones were busy with the workshop and an email with the info hadn't made it through yet (it came in about 45 minutes later.)

The contact unfortunately didn't show as active but we were able to be called by them and later call them. Instant messaging also worked. We tried to get video running from the Dannevirke end but it told us bluetooth video(wireless) wasn't working. Then it just kept dropping out.

So it didn't work, despite several tries. Too many people at the Dannevirke end on line for the workshop?

There was also the question about how much of Dannevirke's bandwidth the call would use.

Conclusion in the short term it's probably not worth it, you spend as much time setting up and organising it as you would have travelling, and there's no guarantee it will work.
We might try and do some PD with the facilitator skyping in (possibly from the next room :lol:)and see how that works next.

We'd be interested in comments on how others who have tried this have gone, and of course feedback from the team at the other end.

Nga Tikanga

Click on image to enlarge

Happy Birthday Max and Harry

Happy Birthday Max and Harry

It's a Monica one.

Welcome back to Term 4.

I was so glad to hear everyone was safe after the holiday's events, though it sounds like many of the farms will still be suffering the effects for a while yet. Our thoughts are with you.

The butterflies are back again this term, but they were also here last term (see video). For some reason the kids still call them Monica butterflies.

With the butterflies back and our frogs waking up, we need lots of flies, moths, cockroaches and bugs, so please do take the opportunity to get out in the long evenings and catch some for Kindergarten.

I had a great holiday exploring Napier with my family and working on the yard and garden, as well and spending plenty of time at work getting the E-Profiles up and running and the paper profiles uploaded. I also popped over to Havelock North to spend a day story telling at Arataki Honey Ltd at their very popular family day, and thanks to their generous donation we should have some new toys for the kindergarten very soon. (I went through a catalogue with several of the children last term in anticipation.)

I also managed to catch up with some of our kids and plenty of new faces when I was invited to talk about bugs with Scallywags childcare's kindergarten group. We had a lot of fun as I released two male locusts to leap around the mat time. (They were meant to be passed around but the locusts had other ideas.)

A lot of people have been asking me about how the Ben Warren course has been going so here's a summary.

Ben Warren Course

Well it's week four now, my children are having a bit of trouble adjusting to the changes in our diet, the cost is mounting, nearly $500 on supplement packs so far, nearly $500 on a water filter system, nearly $500 for the 12 week course, plus nearly $500 for the weekend course for the two of us.

However that said I'm getting a lot out of it, and it makes sense.

basically it's:

Drink enough water for your body size eg. 2l 60kg, 3 l 90kg. (Not out of plastic bottles which when heated or left in the light leech damaging psuedo hormones you really don't want to drink. Also not containing fluoride which interfers with thyroid function, or chlorine which interfers with gut bacteria.)

Cut out anything your body regards as toxic (toxins get wrapped in fat to keep the body safe)such as

-damaged fats like oils that have been heated [instead cook in lard, butter, or coconut oil and no deep frying],

-processed food with numbers added to preserve it etc,

-processed white sugar, (A British study released in the holidays just found children who ate sweets daily 25 years ago are more likely to have committed violent offences by age 34 than children who didn't eat sweets.- note Small sample size however and no causation implied)( Molasses is all the good bits, minerals vitamins etc that have been extracted from sugar. We like sweet tastes, because in natural unprocessed food, a sweet taste is associated with nutrition.)(Sugar is carbs without the nutrition, the body uses spare carbs to build fats and stores them away, because there's no nutrition you end up still feeling hungry.)

-gluten, (Wheat has been breed to double gluten content in the last hundred years.)

-pasteurised and homogenised milk (raw milk is fine, pasteurisation destroys lactase needed to break down lactose, many lactose intolerant find they can drink raw milk. [It's nice drinking milk with cream again like I did as a kid.])

Learn to monitor your bodies responses to foods to see what it reacts to, so you can avoid them.

Take moderate exercise but not if you're stressed.

Restock various minerals we need via food (boosted by supplements while getting everything back up to par.)

Eat a big breakfast and lunch to give energy during the day, balancing protein, fats and carbo's according to bodies needs and type.

Eat a small tea. (People who get hungry quick after eating carbo meals need to add more protein to slow down the carbo uptake, plus lower GI foods, maybe up to 70% of the meal protein.)

Eat good fats (fats are essential for maintaining the bodies hormone systems, free range pig lard is great, lots of vitamin D. Saturated fats are less likely to be damaged by heating than poly unsaturated ones, which should never be heated.)

Eat fresh, eat spray free and hormone free (much nutrition is lost in the first 4 days after picking, residues are often toxic)

Take time to chew your food well to help you digest it, relax and don't be stressed while eating, so no t.v. breath from the stomach. (Chewing helps your body know it's full also.)

So I've been skimming the cream off my milk to make homemade butter and icecream, making yoghurt, fermenting a variety of grains in yoghurt, buttermilk and whey before cooking them, eating lots of meat, fruit and green leafy vegetables, drinking lots of water, exercising and feeling great.

JUMPING FROM OUR TREE

Our basic, yet enjoyable activity during the last weeks of Term 3 consisted of a ladder (secured to the tree), some soft landing mats and our precious gum tree. Climbing trees helps children to develop upper body strength to enhance skills such as swinging, hanging and climbing. It also helps to develop arm and shoulder strength and muscle control. These skills are necessary for the development of controlled fine motor hand movements such as threading, posting, painting and handwriting. Children were drawn in to the adventure of this experience. Some were confident of their abilities and others practiced with me as a helping hand until they were confident to jump unaided. I watched with interest as our children watched, encouraged and learnt from each other. Peer learning is so powerful.