spider story

and one more.

David

My Holiday -David

Here's some of the work I've been up to in the holidays.

Drawing on what I was learning last year I decided to practise making slideshow e-books with my children and these were the result. They were really fun and are definite favourites for my kids. They are real easy to make, just download photostory3 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx (which is free) draw some pictures and scan them in. Record your voices and you have a story.

My children are determined to make their own, and I'd like to try this at kindergarten next.

You can even make them into DVD's.

My Holidays - Monica
I had a wonderful term break, and after getting lots of jobs done around the house (painting inside, gardening and supervising the building of a very large deck), I headed off on holiday for 2 1/2 weeks relaxation. I spent a week on Motiti Island, off the coast at Tauranga, which was very peaceful and relaxing. Then it was off to Tolaga Bay with friends camping. This was great fun, lots of sunshine, swimming and laughs.
It is very exciting to be back at work, although it isn't for long. I finish here at Hunter Park on Friday 20th February in order to start my new role as a Facilitator with Massey University, based in Napier. I will be supporting other early childhood educators by providing professional learning support. I am very excited about this and looking forward to the challenge of this new role, but of course I am not looking forward to saying goodbye to the wonderful children and families! There will be tears, I just know it! I will have to drop in often!!!
Monica

Baby Crickets

After waiting all summer for the crickets we purchased to breed, we've finally got babies. I think it took so long because I had let the sand get too dry. After I added more water, eggs and babies started to appear.


Here's some photos of our mother crickets checking out the new terrarium I brought for myself and for the kindy to use. It has 14 hour day:10 hour night lighting, and under floor heating, real flash.You can tell they're girls because of the long ovipositor at the back of them and because their wings have straight veins. The dads are the ones that sing, and their wings are rougher.

Here are some of the babies not long hatched out of their eggs, on an egg carton (for chicken eggs). They're the same size as ants, but jump and have long attenae.

Here's a close up of the eggs in the sand I got from the sand pit

Try and spot them here, there are more than I've highlighted. Normally they're under the moss, but I've temporarily pulled it back to reveal them, before I covered them up again to keep them safe. That's what that long ovipositor is for, laying the eggs under the ground.

David

Term dates

Welcome back to 2009, Kindergarten started with the children on Tuesday the 27th, with all the teachers in the association having a meeting in Hastings on Monday. As well as learning about the latest ideas in assessment we also learnt that New Zealand will need an estimated 6,000 teachers in Earlychildhood in the next 3 years, though only 1,500 are currently training this year. So if your interested in teaching in kindergarten now's the time, there's even scholarships available.

The term dates for this year are:
Term 1 Tuesday 27th January -Thursday 9th April.
closed
Wednesday 6th Feb. Waitangi day
Good Friday 10th April
Easter Monday 13th April
ANZAC day 25th April

Term 2 Monday 27th April -Friday 3rd July
Closed Queen's Birthday, Monday 1st June

Term 3 Monday 20th July-Friday 25th Sept.

Term 4 Monday 12th Oct-Friday 18th Dec.
Closed
H.B. Annv. Friday 23rd Oct.
Monday 26th Oct Labour Day.

What do teachers do in the summer break? Well I wrote and illustrated three e books with my children using photostory 3. I'll try to put the suitable ones up on the Kindergarten blog site at some stage and onto D.V.D. as well. I updated the inventory adding hyperlinks and colour and kept the garden watered and the various animals fed, amongst other things.

Finally we'd all like to congratulate Monica on her appointment to Massey, though we'll all miss her, this is a great move for her, more on this later.

David

Kidsmart Computer has arrived

The new kidsmart computer arrived last week.
As a result, I haven't been blogging while I've been setting up each child with a file on it, along with a bmp photo, and a voice greeting. (It turned out to be a multistep process to convert large jpg to small bmp that look okay.) Now it's ready to go, the children have been enjoying getting to know it and what it can do. (Like send a voice mail to the other children at the kindergarten.)

We were lucky enough to get a new big flat screen, but this meant a little bit of conversion work was necessary to fit it to the display it came in. So off came the slightly small front panel and up went some high quality card and velcro. A big thankyou to the team at IBM, Riverdeep and little tikes for the donation and the time spend setting it up and at the training day.

New Baby visits

A very proud big brother showed off his brand new baby brother. Suddenly he started to cry. No worries big bro knew what to do, and sung him "baa baa black sheep", lulling him back to sleep. This happened several times as we learnt from him about where the baby had been and about things like the clamp that had been on his cord. He didn't just sing the same song though, he mixed it up including this version of "row row row", his dad said we could put on the blog.