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Visitors to the service, involvement in community events

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Visitors to the service, involvement in community events

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Table activities, play areas, posters, and displays

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Table activities, play areas, posters, and displays

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This month we had a special visit from Chelsea the Kookaburra who put on a show called Birds Eye View. This explored topics such as rubbish sorting, birds and eggs, and saving water in a fun and engaging way.

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This month we had Tanya From Junkyard Beats to perform and play with the children. Junkyard Beats show the children that you can create music and fun from recycled and household materials by using your creativity!

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Our special Dottie the Quoll has arrived at Gumnut. We received her for making a donation to the WWF! Thank you to everybody who has contributed to the donation so far and worn something spotty to school.

Dottie is currently hanging out in an ‘enclosure’ made of natural and recycled materials where the children are able to say hi and give her a pat, alongside our special adoption certificate.

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Today we had Junkyard Beats visit our preschool to engage the children in music using recycled materials such as buckets, broken frying pans, plastic bags, and plastic bottles. The children got to play a variety of instruments made from everyday items!

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This month we had a special visit from Karlie from Tiny Tins! Karlie read some books about what a rubbish truck does, spoke about the three R’s, and did a rubbish sorting activity with the children

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In September we welcomed Sam from planet tidy into the preschool and engaged with her performance about keeping our planet tidy.

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We will use Plastic Free July’s ‘plastic free choices calendar’, ‘pesky plastic quiz’, and website to inspire our decisions when it comes to plastic here at the service. Maybe you would like to involve your children at home too! 💚

https://www.plasticfreejuly.org

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Children interacting with natural and recycled craft experiences

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Children interacting with natural and recycled craft experiences

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This month we got a brand new Mud Kitchen in the outdoor environment! This mud kitchen encourages children to explore natural materials in their play while ‘cooking’ with dirt, rocks, leaves, and bark.

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One rainy day the children practiced their paper maché skills using scrap paper from our recycling bin

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One day we got out some brown paper and all decided to work together to draw a garden. We flowers, insects, birds and a farmer! This activity encouraged the children to take a look at the world and garden around them!

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During nature play week we had many natural and recycled craft opportunities for the children to engage with, including collage tree making using ripped cardboard and shopping bags for tree trunks and real leaves and scrap green paper as foliage.

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Today the younger children used mud to paint outside on big paper! This week is School Clean Up Week so we’re focusing on natural and recycled craft activities.

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Over the last couple of weeks we have been working on some Australian animal craft to decorate our Australian Wildlife Rescue Centre. We used recycled and scrap materials where we could for our craft, as well as natural coloured paints.

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We had a special visit from Mat from Surf Sustainability. Mat brought in some old surf boards and skate boards that were just going to get thrown away, he fixed them up and painted them for our the Gumnuts to decorate!

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We created another sustainable craft to decorate our Recycle Centre. We used cardboard from a delivery, green and yellow paints with green and yellow scrap collage pieces! This activity encouraged the discussion of what the recycle symbol means.

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In preparation for Clean Up Australia Day, we decided to set up a recycling truck dramatic play area. To decorate this area the children created their very own recycling truck using glue sticks, coloured paper, scrap collage pieces, paper plates and black pen.

The children first put glue all over their page with a glue stick. They chose whether they would like a green or yellow rubbish truck. An educator cut out a truck shape and the children stuck the truck to their paper. Then they glued a paper plate piece to the back of their truck to create the image of a truck dumping rubbish. Then they stuck on a variety of scrap paper pieces as ‘rubbish’. The last step was for the children to draw a square for a window and some circles for the wheels of the truck. All of the trucks turned out so unique, some with two wheels and others with lots of wheels!

This experience encouraged the children to use their creative skills, fine motor skills, independence, and experimentation. We also explored colour and shape recognition when working with the different coloured paper and drawing squares and circles.

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Today we had a special visit from, Mat from Surf Sustainability. Mat taught our Gumnut friends about re-using materials. He read us a fun surfing story first and the gumnuts enjoyed some sea animal yoga.

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This wonderful wall is where we display up-to-date pictures of the children participating in sustainable experiences. This wall is a lovely reminder for the children to reflect on the important activities they have engaged in such as gardening, recycled craft, and rubbish sorting

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Last Tuesday it was raining so we decided to use materials from our recycled material donation basket to create some rain cloud decorations for the preschool. We used blue and white paints, cardboard, string, and scrap bubble wrap to create the rain clouds.
Talking about and creating activities around the weather encourages children to think about the natural world around them. Throughout this experience we talking about rain; why it happens, and how it helps the Earth. We also talked about how using the recycled materials prevents us from creating more waste.

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We have recently purchased some new resources which have been spread around the service to help regularly involve children in the topic of sustainability. This poster shows the A-Z of ways children can help protect the planet!

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Here is a nature play space that has been set using the natural materials sourced through the Take Home Pets! Here the children have the opportunity to explore pine cones, gumnuts, rocks, pebbles, shells, sticks, bark, and leaves.

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On Tuesday we had Greg from Yama2you come to the service and show the children some bush tucker that they got to try. The children painted with ochre and learnt about some things that Indigenous people used to live and hunt.

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Last year the children helped to create some large posters that help to explain the topics of recycling and composting. These posters encourage questions and discussions about recycling and composting, as well as reminding and encouraging the children to recycle and compost.

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Yesterday we had a special visit from Greg from Yama 2 You Bush Tucker Nursery where he taught the children loads about the land and Aboriginal culture! He left us some ochre which is a natural found mineral that when mixed into water or oils can be used as a liquid to paint with.
We decided to use it today with some natural materials as our brushes. The children used brown paper to experiment with the ochre and natural materials.

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This morning the children helped me to create some colourful recycled bouquets using donated cardboard boxes and coloured markers! They look amazing on the shelf 🥰

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Our latest garden updates, caring for our garden

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Our latest garden updates, caring for our garden

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Tips and tricks that you could use with your children at home 

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Tips and tricks that you could use with your children at home 

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Children interacting with natural and recycled play experiences

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Children interacting with natural and recycled play experiences

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Lately the children have been enjoying using the toy trucks to load and transfer natural rock and dirt cargo from the garden

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During February we are focused on how to keep our planet clean for Clean Up Australia Day. The children were involved through sustainable craft, learning about the rubbish bins and protecting our planet flash cards

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This morning we are having a blast making a huge mess of recycled materials!

I used some scrap paper to print some recycle symbols and a ‘Gumnut Village Recycle Service’ label for all of our trucks. The children helped me to make a mess of the earth with paper and cardboard from our recycle bin.

Then I set up some obstacles like traffic cones and foam blocks for them to drive around as they got to work collecting the rubbish in their truck.

The children loved grabbing handfuls of paper and throwing it in the air like confetti 😄

We also did a super fun recycled material shopping bag craft with glue and scrap items.

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During Superhero Week, we found ways to use recycled materials in our table activities including using old boxes as superhero buildings, and scrap materials for a ‘Hulk’ sensory tray.

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We ensure sustainability is an ongoing practice at the service by involving natural and recycled materials in our everyday activities; for example creating cardboard surf boards for a table activity during Water Safety Week, and using rocks to create a ‘swimming pool’.

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Here is our special Gumnut Recycling Centre! This is the new dramatic play space for February, in preparation for Clean Up Australia Day which we will be involved in next week.

In this area the children have the opportunity to do a rubbish sorting activity, drive a rubbish truck, wear hi-vis vests, sort real ‘rubbish’ donated by the families, read stories relating to cleaning up rubbish, and build with the ‘rubbish’!

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A great way to encourage a sustainable future is to encourage your child to notice and appreciate the natural environment. One way to do this is to play a game of ‘Nature I Spy’ when you and your child are in the backyard, at the park, or on a walk. You and your child can take turns finding something in nature and sharing a clue about it for the other to guess, for example “I spy something in nature that is white and fluffy in the sky”

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This morning we extended off of the children’s recent interest in bugs by creating a bug hotel for our nature/insect table. We hope to collect some more natural materials to place inside our bug hotel! 🌱

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Gardening provides a great introduction for children to the environment around them. They have the opportunity to take responsibility while learning about how nature works. Gardening at home can also encourage your child to get excited about trying new fruits and vegetables! If you have limited space at home, a windowsill garden might work for you. You could even use recycled food tins to reduce waste.

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Today we took lots of opportunities to learn about the rain. We started the morning out with some children helping me to put some buckets out in the rain. We watched rain songs, danced to a rain dance, and had a group discussion about what causes the rain and what the rain feels like. We talked about how the rain can sometimes be sprinkley, and other times be big water droplets! We also talked about how the rain helps the Earth.

This afternoon once the sun had came out some children helped me to pour our rainwater from the buckets into the garden. We talked about how we are saving water from the taps by helping the garden grow with rain water instead!

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The week of 8.4.24-12.4.24 was Nature Play Week at Gumnut Village Preschool. We spent this whole week at the service involving nature in our everyday play, including painting with sticks and leaves, sensory bin play, and water play. The children and families did an awesome job bringing in natural resources from their local environments for the preschool to use in play. This encouraged the children to feel responsible and involved in the nature play process.

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Changes we have made at the service to reduce our waste

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Changes we have made at the service to reduce our waste

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From this day onwards we will document the services sustainability journey through the online platform Padlet to help reduce our waste. This strategy will result in a significant decrease of printing supplies that were used for our sustainability documentation folder.

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This year we began using a natural, allergen friendly, and environmentally friendly, bulk all purpose cleaner for the majority of cleaning within the service. This product is placed in a reusable spray bottle and is used for disinfecting surfaces and toys, window cleaning, and floor cleaning. This product takes the place of the previously used disinfectant wipes that were not recyclable or biodegradable, as well as limited use bottled use products such as floor cleaner and window cleaner.

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This year we introduced our take home pets that encourage the children to explore the natural environment and bring natural materials back to the service to be used for play and craft experiences. This strategy helps us to bring more nature indoors at the service while also involving the children and families.

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Buying little often requires more plastic packaging than buying in bulk. Purchasing foods such as snacks, cereal, and pasta and storing in reusable containers is a great way to reduce plastic waste!

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We have been using the natural materials collected by the take home pets to set up a variety of nature play experiences.

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Learning and using a 20-30 second hand washing song can encourage children to wash their hands thoroughly, as well as reduce water wastage by turning the tap off when the song is done!

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Reading books with earth-friendly messages in them help children to develop their understanding of sustainability. Books encourage children to learn about things in an age appropriate and engaging manner. Some awesome children’s books with sustainable messages include The Tree by Neal Layton, ABC Mother Earth and Me by Christiane Engel, and My Home My Planet by Jane Kent.

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We encourage the children to water the garden with the rainwater that is collected in our watering cans

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During June we restarted around front veggie garden by pulling out the old plants and adding new soil and seeds! We planted silver beet, onions, carrots, and broccoli!

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Nate and Jordan shared the carrots that we grew in the Gumnut Garden with some local horses! We’re so glad somebody could enjoy our carrots.

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Our radishes and cucumbers beginning to sprout and grow!

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Now that the weather is getting warmer and we have some new planter boxes, we decided to get a garden going! The children helped Miss Gemma to plant some strawberry, lettuce, carrot, tomato, and herb seeds.

As we worked the children shared what fruits and vegetables they liked to eat and Miss Gemma explained how plants grow.