Dancing Rainbows

With the beautiful fine, calm day came the oppertunity to make Rainbows.

Lots of rainbows. Rainbows are easy to make, put a perspex (safer than glass) mirror in a bowl of water (A small rock helps keep it at the right angle) and shine the reflection onto a shaded wall nearby. Now tilt the mirror so the reflection travels up the wall, then somewhere along the simmery line beneath the reflection you will see some refraction happening as the water and the mirror act as a prism to split the light into it's colours.

The water has to be still though or the rainbow with break up.

Once it's formed try tapping the surface of the water with your finger to make the rainbows dance. Once you have tried dancing rainbows, try different coloured water to see what happens, play around with the mirrors, how far can you reflect the light, shine it into dark corners, chase each's others sun beams around the wall?

["Here is a gecko" if you wondered why this was here, that's because it's taken me a few days get the time to finish getting this up and I was just showing one of the primary teachers who came to our great links between kindergarten and primary workshop how easy it is to blog.]

A Great Time with Music

We decided to bring the music trolley outside last week under the veranda. We also brought the stereo and a wide variety of CD's. Lots and lots of the chilren came along during the week to have a go at the wonderful music and dancing activies that were happening. Some of the time a teacher was working alongside the children, encouraging them to try out different instruments and ways of moving their bodies. Other times the children worked independently, setting their own goals and exploring ways of working.

It is great to see so many children exploring different ways of moving their body, listening to different types of music, such as drums, classical and music from the radio and working alongside others.

Lots of boys decided to join in with us as well - great to see!

We will have the music out again this week and se what other types of music we can find.

Baby Gecko

Something seems to be telling me I need to build a gecko enclosure and help start a gecko rescue programme with the children at the kindergarten.

Why you might ask?

Well when I got home from my meeting today guess what was waiting?

A baby gecko a neighbour had found on their wood brought in from Ongaonga.


So even though it was 6:30pm back up to work and a new habitat set up in our reserve terrarium as the main one is still with D.O.C. following the return of our pregnant female. (We've been hard to get hold of in the afternoons with various meetings and our risk assessment trip prior to our up coming visit to Lindsay bush.)

That our first one was so pregnant and this is quite small (they give birth to live young remember), does makes me wonder if the birth autumn and winter information was correct however, but I guess this could be a mid winter baby.


Anyway I know one little girl who will be rapt to see a gecko here. I will contact D.O.C. about how to get a permit today.
Anyway more honey water (manuka this time-Thankyou Arataki Honey), the smallest of our baby locusts and slaters, plus water and hopefully baby will soon be settled in till we can arrange it's return.
Meanwhile with the donated web cam hopefully arriving tomorrow (again thankyou to Pam at Arataki Honey), we might have some interesting video for our friends at Lucknow Kindergarten when we link to them.
David

Gecko -Follow up

DOC send us a letter, and on Friday (despite it being a public holiday locally) the dedicated DOC team came and collected our Gecko to return her to the bush having talked with the family about the location she was found in.
While she was here I noted she drank up a lot of her honey water, and not many bugs. I suspect with the Manuka currently in flower that she may have been feeding on a lot of nectar in the wild.

DOC wrote.
"What a beautiful specimen. It looks like it may be a gravid (pregnant) female to me by the size of its tummy. Thank you for notifying us of its existence and I will arrange to have it picked up and returned to the wild. Unfortunately cats (domestic and wild) seem to find native lizards a very attractive prey item. They are probably one of the main reasons so many of our endemic lizards have either disappeared from the mainland altogether or are now threatened with extinction

John Adams, DOC Napier
Cheers, John "

We're just glad to have helped.
Another of our associations kindergartens (Christine's) turns out to have been interested in setting up a gecko habitat for captive breed geckos, we're going to set up a video link with them so our children can discuss geckos together.
David

Roller Paintings

The children created these beautiful paintings by adding blobs of paint and then folding the paper in half and using a roller to spread the paint around. This was a great opportunity to explore pattern, shape and design and to talk about the concept of symmetry. This links with children's developing ideas about maths concepts such as half, quater and the same.

Here are just some of the beautiful creations we made. To see more, come into Kindergarten and have a look!

This bright colours look wonderful! I wonder if the children would like to do this again sometime? Written by Monica

Gecko

One of the children's dads rescued a gecko, the second lizard to have been found by a family in the last few weeks.
sadly the first one a skink never made it to kindergarten but got eaten by the family cat who fished it out of the tank they were keeping it in before it could be returned to the bush or taken to DOC, perhaps it was karma because that's how they'd found it rescuing it from another cat.

The girl who brought this one in wanted to take it home again but we had to let her know they're protected and you can't even pick them up without a permit.
We've set up a temporary terrarium to keep it alive till it can be returned with some baby locusts, flies, slaters, drinking water, moss, bark and leaves, and some honeyed water and have found the number for DOC on their website.
http://www.doc.govt.nz/templates/page.aspx?id=70432
This particular link also has some great ways to make your home garden gecko friendly.



We've researched some facts about geckos, this one is probably a forest gecko, and a great source of information was
http://www.hamiltonzoo.co.nz/page/pageid/2145834603/Forest_Gecko

Did you know they can live to 42 years of age, give birth to live young (usually 2 in autumn or early winter) , are the only lizard to vocalise making a little chirping sound, eat fruit, bugs and nectar (but can be fussy eaters), can change colour slowly, live in trees, and are active at night, and everything eats them.




Lots of people remembered finding and keeping them as children. Adele says she's learnt if they lose their tail it can take a year to grow back, during which time they won't have babies.
http://www.nhc.net.nz/index/lizards-new-zealand/forest-gecko/forest-gecko.htm has some close up photo's of them. They don't blink so have to lick their eyes.
One day we may have to apply for a permit to keep them, but we'll probably have to have previous experience in lizard care and a scientific or breeding purpose to do so. I know our little girl who brought it in wants "a license" so she can keep her much loved new friend.

http://www.reptiles.org.nz/
have information on permits, and also excellent information on care and how to set up a gecko inclousure. They recommend large outdoor, with mesh sides as geckos need sunlight and glass filters the wavelengths they need. Once you get a permit you can obtain animals from established captive breeding programmes but not from the wild.
Their NZ reptiles and photo gallery pages have an excellent photo gallery and distribution map to help figure out what you found when you see a lizard and take it's photo.
I would recommend contacting the society if you decide you would like to keep lizards.

http://www.nzlizardzone.com/meet%20the%20web%20master/meet%20the%20webmaster.html
has one New Zealanders story of how they got to keep lizards, photo's of their permits and the site also features a contact address. They might be worth contacting if you want to keep lizards.
David

Our Frog Died

Just on two years old, and we were hoping soon to have spawned, one of our two mother frogs died in a horrible accident last night.
She'd been chasing a fly, high on the glass when David saw her jump off. He noticed sitting funny, that her tongue was out. He watched her take two big breaths then she stopped.



We found she had landed on a piece of wire that had lain unseen on the pot holding her water weed. All our frogs had loved to sit in the pot, and the wire, that must have been to hold the weed in place, had come adrift and now faced upwards. It pierced through into her tongue, killing her.

Today we spend time with her, looking at her, learning about her. One girl carried her around in a paua shell and wanted to take her home to show her mum she had died. She sang her a song to make her come alive again.

One of the boys wanted to put her in water to make her alive.

In the end after one of the children thought we should have something soft for her the teachers left cherry blossom on the table.

The children found it and covered her with flowers.

We then dug a hole, first in a specail spot one of the children had wanted to share, and then, when this prooved to hard, in another beautiful location.

In a coffin of paua, one of the children sung her "Delta dawn" as they shared their experiences of funerals and decided what we should do. And so we buried our friend frog.

Then the children started to gather flowers, and another one of the girls sang her a five minute song about all the things she wanted for her, creating it as she went. She wanted to know, how she would come to life again under the ground. I had to say I didn't know enough about frogs to answer her question.

It was a sad day, full of learning and questions, sharing and discovery.