Three Bears Kindergarten

Please come, please share! 🐘🧜‍♀️🫶

How to make an amazing Fairy Garden!
Every Fairy Garden needs a good plan. A good plan needs to be drawn, talked about and brainstormed! You need just the right location, colours, textures, water, pebbles, logs, sticks, plants, a bit of sparkle and of course Fairies! And a couple of little Gnomes to keep an eye on things. Such brightness, joy and happiness this little space has brought us this week! And the 'real' butterflies are delighted! 🐦

Here’s how a big Popcorn box can be turned into a very large purple Castle. Two boxes from our Stashers, cardboard rolls, hair dye boxes, straws, string, coloured paper windows, a very sharp Stanley knife and lots of sticky tape and purple paint. The original design was simple. It needed more. We added fairies for magic and protection, and some gems for sparkle. Then of course some occupants. A King, Queen, three Knights, a horse, a Dragon, a fairy who incidentally had lost her magic, and finally, a Unicorn! A week of make believe and mystery!🦄

A stasher full of delicious Rocky Road for our very special Dads, Grandpas, Uncles, or any other lucky person who manages to get their hands on it! We have a great community of Dads at Three Bears and are excited to celebrate them together. Thanks Dads. Happy weekend! ❤️

Every day we practise 5 minutes of Tai Chi, outside, in the fresh air, as a transition to lunch. We pretend we're tigers, bears, deer, monkeys and birds. We then do a little 'happiness mantra' to remind us that a little time to regroup, destress and some relaxed breathing, is important for our inner calm, health and happiness. And if that doesn't work, make Rocky Road!🐻🐵🐯

It’s book week every week at Three Bears. Each day we read at least three books. Sometimes my choice, sometimes my little friends’ choice. We read new books, old books, really old books, nonsense books and rhyming books. We read books by very different authors, some Australian, and some not. To celebrate Book Week 2025 we read The Truck Cat, which may just be our favourite award winner yet! Early exposure to books instills a positive attitude toward reading and learning, leading to long-term success.

Side-Sliding, a short sideways step, bringing feet together between each step. Simple as it may sound, it’s not a natural movement for little people who have always stepped forwards or backwards. We side-slided by mirroring our friends and we side-slided with our backs together. And then we did an obstacle course and copied the footprints up the path. And after all that practise, we have now mastered the skill of side-sliding!

Insects are essential to the environment, and by studying them, we can learn about their connection with other living and non-living things and the importance of all living creatures. Thanks to for providing us with our Stick Insect experience this week. We have five female Spiny Leaf Insects that we can hold, watch, water and feed for two weeks. The adults are a little prickly however the juveniles are very interesting and like to climb on us. They don’t hear or see very well but they do like to explore, up and up and up our arms. It’s a very special time for us to take care of something so precious and small, but so very very interesting!🐝

It’s not so much what we ‘teach’ at preschool but our intention. Our patience and attention that we bring to our day will determine the value for our children. Because of this, our little friends can now play SNAP, Go Fish, UNO, and other card games by themselves. Card games; a social experience, mathematical experience, emotional experience, motor skill experience, and a time to think and solve problems. That’s the intention.

In preschool, one-to-one correspondence is the ability to match an object being counted with a single number word. It's a foundational math skill where children understand that one object corresponds to one number. This skill is far beyond reciting number names. With practise we can do it!

These four friends know each other’s favourite colours, each other’s parent’s names and their favourite food for morning tea and lunch. They know how old everyone at preschool is, including me, and they know how many siblings each other has or doesn’t have. I think they would certainly outwit a hungry fierce dragon to save each other just like the Paper Bag Princess, and none of them would be as ungrateful as Prince Ronald.

A Sit Spot is where you sit quietly to breathe, smell, see, listen, and feel the country around you. Some call this Dadirri, a deep listening to place. These are our sit spots to consider our place. We also were so lucky to have a special Grandpa visit us with his didgeridoos this week. We listened to the sounds of the kookaburra, the emu, the dingo and the snake. We watched the hand signals as well to help us learn about the animals in the bush.
Intergenerational connections can only be positive in building relationships, supporting education and a stronger sense of community. ‘The Next Generation’, NAIDOC Week 2025.