March 3rd 2017

We have had a big ‘making’ week this week. We have baked, constructed buildings from pop sticks, built waffle block houses and sewn toys.

We have set a challenge this week to build a tower that is at least 30cm tall and can hold 1kg of weight. The children can only use skewers, pop sticks, pegs and masking tape. So far every is designing slowly and trialling different techniques. This has been a great chance for everyone to develop their problem solving and teamwork skills when working in groups.

While everyone has avoided the outdoors and the heat, some have relished the air con and developed different skills indoors.  Sewing has become popular again for some people, with one student producing a felt gnome.

We have been enjoying watching some David Attenborough documentaries in the last couple of weeks. Although the picture quality is not as good as what we are used to, the sense of adventure and wonder is still engaging from Sir Attenborough. We were even lucky to find a baby blue-tongue lizard during our hot weather! Not fluffy and cuddly, but still adorable.

In our kitchen we baked banana cup-cakes and apple and cinnamon cupcakes on Wednesday. On Thursday we ditched the cooking because of the heat and made chocolate crackles instead.  The groups were challenged to do as much as they could on their own. They had to rely on their reading and comprehension skills to cook.

Our Vacation Care program is being developed as we speak. If there are dates that you know you will definitely need, you can always let us know ahead of time.

 

February 27th 2017

Blog 24/02/2017

We have had a quiet week, with lots of children going to play sports and some leaving early for Parent/Teacher interviews.

This week has been heavily focused on art and sports. Craft has also been popular, with dream homes, hotels for snails and lots of different objects being constructed out of recycled materials. Here is a water park that was designed with slides, swings and showers. 

Our young people have also been putting together some collages, displaying images that they liked or felt represented them. Some people also made mashed images with different heads on different bodies. We even had a couple of girls construct a magazine! 

We have also seen a bigger interest in painting lately, particularly abstract images and shapes. Because we have a hot week next week, we will be supplying a lot more art and craft activities to help keep everyone cool.

With the cooler weather on its way, football has started to reappear. Along with cricket being a constant, we have been playing lots of soccer, badminton and basketball. Gymnastics is being practised frequently. But not just on the blue mats, we are seeing it practised on the oval, in the play ground….inside the OSHC building. But it is great to see!

Roller skates and roller blades have been used a lot lately. It is always a source of great pride when we see our older students lending a hand to our receptions, helping them balance, strapping on the shoes and giving advice. This supportive behaviour is seen during sports, arts and helping out with afternoon tea. We are very impressed!

There seems to be many people reading at OSHC lately. Harry Potter seems to be back in vogue, along with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Northwood. A bit about Northwood from Gemma:

“A girl called Cecilia, lives with her mum and dad in a six story balloon house. She finds out that a man who was once kind, turned mean owns a dog called Rocky, who he treats badly. When Cecilia steals the dog, the man takes revenge”. – Gemma C.

Board and card games seem to be rising in popularity. Uno, battleship, Super Fight and Fluxx are played the most. But we see other games being played too. These games are a great way for the adults to get involved and spend more time with the kids.

We will soon start planning the April Vacation Care program. If you have any excursions, incursions or activities that you have liked in the past, please let us know! Also if you know you will be away in the lead up to the holidays please come see us early to arrange dates.

February 21st 2017

Firstly we would like to apologise for the delayed blogs this year! We have been without internet for sometime now. 

Welcome back and welcome to new students and families for 2017!!!

We have kicked off this year and are back into the swing of things. We have some new students and families joining us, so this is a great chance to give you all some reminders.

Reminders

Lost property can be found next to computers. Clothes, containers, water bottles and personal items accumulate there. After a long period we move these to the schools lost property.

Tuesday is going to remain our electronic free day. We will also continue to be limiting time on devices in the evenings. Children get to watch a turn and play a turn. Turns last 20 minutes. This is so we can promote other options, such as sports, outdoor play, creative arts and crafts, role playing games and more.

Bookings are to be honoured or paid for. If children are absent due to illness or emergencies, we will make exceptions. But we expect a cancellation before 11am on the day of the booking to avoid an absent fee. This is so that families who are looking for bookings can find a place. As some nights are booked out, this is important to us so we can continue to provide care for families.

This year there are some changes to staffing.  Maya has now graduated from uni and is a qualified teacher. She is starting a part time role at another school.

Brandon has heard the call of the mountains once again, the whispering of wind through the valleys. He will be going to spend three to seven months in Falls Creek. While working he will be able to mountain bike and snowboard.

Sarah will be completing her studies and will be gone most of May and June on placement but will be back for the remainder of the year.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been playing volleyball, cricket, football and tennis in the SAC. We have avoided being outdoors while the weather has been unbearable, both to avoid sunburn but also heat exhaustion for a little ones.

This has meant that we have spent more time indoors. We’ve been watching more movies, playing more video games, building cubby houses, reading books and playing board games.  Battleships has been the favourite this week. We love board games as they can help to build on skills the students are learning in class. Battleships can build on coordinate and grid understanding; monopoly can develop addition and subtraction and so on.

We have now introduced a written poster for wii and computer games. These rules have always been in place but are now being supported with visual aids. 

Here’s some photos of what we’ve been doing at OSHC this week.

Hotel for ants

See you next time J

Menu for the week.

Monday: Baked Beans and Bread

Tuesday: Tomato Pasta and cheese

Wednesday: Popcorn

Thursday: Custard

Friday: Bread and Spreads

All served with fresh fruits and salads. We also supply gluten free options to those students that require it.

Vacation Care January 2017

Welcome back to OSHC for 2017!

Because we had such a busy end to 2016 unfortunately we didn’t get a blog out for the end of term.

We are glad to have Dianne back with us after extended leave from last year. Welcome back Dianne!!!

We are expecting that 2017 will be an interesting year at Eden Hills OSHC. Both Maya and Damian have graduated their Bachelor of Education degrees at the end of 2016 with Sarah expected to finish mid this year. This will mean there are potentially some changes to staff coming.

We have had lots of fun over vacation care with a few excursions and some really cool activities at home. We started the week with a cooking and food day, with fresh juice from apple and carrot, berry and banana smoothies and customised pizzas.

We further expanded our knowledge of food and produce with a trip to the Central Markets. There we ate wallaby salami, pickled octopus, dragon-eye fruit and lychee. It was amazing how brave everyone was when trying something new. Everyone got to spend a bit of money and buy some small things of interest; we even went to Haighs’ for a taste test.

Mid-weed Damian changed roles and became our soccer coach. Damian has played for years and loves his soccer (football). He taught individual skills, like dribbling, passing and shooting goals. After so much interest from the children we were able to run a friendly game to try out our newly acquired skills.

Thursday was our creative day. Matt visited us and taught us about animation, its history, purpose and how it evolved over the years. We then got to create our own animations using a stop-go animation app on ipads. If you want to see the end result, click here. The password is edhja11013.

We also inked our skin with henna, which is a temporary tattoo. These are some of our results.

In the second week of Vacation Care we added even more variety to our activities.

We started off by having a basketball clinic with Dwayne Nelson, who taught us the basic skills. This was a great chance for inexperienced children to learn something new and for seasoned players to help others and develop more confidence.

We got our hands dirty on Tuesday when we re-potted some herbs and flowers to take home. We love this cruisy activity as it is a great opportunity to sit and talk with kids and get to know more about them. As we toil away we get to hear stories of home, what their gardens are like and what chores they have to do.

Wednesday we had an excursion to Gorge Wildlife Park where we fed animals, had a tour and got to pet a koala and a snake. The park has an amazing collection of animals including Australian animals (Dingos, Tasmanian Devils, Fruit Bats etc) and others from around the world (Gibbons, Capuchin Monkeys, Tamarins, Marmosets, lemurs and spider monkeys). The Park also has a reptile house full of scaly slithering bodies!

For our final day of holidays we were so lucky to have one of our favourite nerds, David, join us for a program called ‘In your guts’. David used some clever ways to explain how things worked in the digestive system. They used a stocking with a ball in it to explain how the muscles in our oesophagus contract to push down food. David also had some hands on activities, and performed some chemical reactions to explain how food is dissolved and processed in the body.

We are so excited to start another wonderful year in term 1. Sad, that some of our children will not be returning, either moving away or starting high school. But eager to meet some new faces too!

Bookings from last year will be carried over to this year unless we are otherwise notified.