Tall Tree Early Learning - Mullaloo

This week in the Kwila Room, the children have continued learning about people who help us in the community, with a special focus on lollipop men and women as part of Road Safety Week. Through hands-on experiences, the Kindy children strengthened their early literacy and fine motor skills by forming and writing the letter “R” for Road using playdough and whiteboards. To extend their understanding of staying road safe, the children participated in a local excursion with Educators Abbie and Danika, where they identified road signs and zebra crossings while practicing safe pedestrian behaviours such as holding hands, stopping, looking, and listening before crossing roads.

The excursion also provided opportunities for the children to collect natural materials for our upcoming Art Exhibition, fostering creativity, collaboration, and a connection with the natural environment. Following this experience, the children explored visual provocations of traditional Indigenous huts, caves, and fire pits before using clay and the natural resources gathered on Country to create their own representations for the exhibition. The children have thoroughly enjoyed participating in this meaningful hands-on learning experience and have shown great enthusiasm in being involved throughout the entire creative process.

Earlier in the week, we celebrated International Bee Day through a range of engaging and sensory-rich learning experiences. The children explored the importance of honeybees within our environment, discussing their habitats, characteristics, life cycle, and role in producing honey. Through sensory play, creative experiences, and a shape-matching activity, the children further developed their fine motor skills, early mathematical understanding, and problem-solving abilities while engaging in meaningful conversations and collaborative learning.

Our Kindy children certainly have been busy little bees themselves this week!

Over the past few weeks, our Bamba Room children have been exploring their connection to nature, the changing seasons, and learning about autumn alongside the Noongar season of Djeran and its connection to Country and land.

A highlight of our experiences has been the simple exploration of natural materials through hands-on play and discovery. Educator Claudia created a wonderful nature matching puzzle where children matched natural items to their outlined shapes. This experience supported children’s observation skills, problem-solving, visual discrimination, and connection to the natural environment.

The children have also been involved in planting seedlings and learning how to care for plants, developing responsibility, patience, and an understanding of growth and sustainability. Creativity has flourished through painting with natural materials such as leaves and twigs, using them as stamps to create unique artworks inspired by nature.

Another engaging experience involved sorting seeds by size and colour, encouraging early mathematical thinking, classification skills, and fine motor development. The children also explored sprouting dry beans, chickpeas, and black beans, carefully observing how they changed and grew over time. These experiences sparked conversations about life cycles, growth, and caring for living things.

As part of their exploration of seasonal change, the children observed the changing colours of leaves and created their own autumn branches using autumn-coloured tissue paper pressed onto twigs. They also collaboratively painted and decorated a large piece of fallen bark using autumn tones and collected leaves, which is now proudly displayed in the room as a shared artwork celebrating nature and creativity.

The Bamba Room is also in the process of creating a nature scrapbook. Families have been encouraged to contribute items and photographs from their weekend adventures and share what nature and land mean to them. This ongoing project strengthens children’s sense of belonging and connection between home, community, and the natural world.