Take Off Learning Academy

We hope you are all having a wonderful Easter long weekend! 😊 Thought we'd share some photos from our Easter workshop. The children had so much fun painting eggs, baking and decorating cookies, making cards and hunting for eggs. 🎨🥚🥰

With all this gloomy weather and the dreadful rain, we thought we’d share a little post to brighten your day! 🥰 Can you guess what letter the children have been learning? ☺️

As our wonderful kids start their new journey into kindergarten, we decided to throw it back to the final days of pre kindy. These were just too cute not to share! 🥰

Schools back! 🤗 Good luck to everyone in term 1 especially our last year’s superstars who start their journey into kindergarten this year! 🙌

Our last week of school holidays and the children took a quick trip around the world! 🌎 We focused on a few countries and explored their cultures through food, art and a fun STEM challenge. 🙌
The children made their own sushi, created beautiful African animal art and we also challenged them to construct the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of recyclables.
To make them feel like they were really travelling, we gave them each a passport and stamped it after we learnt and completed the activity about the country.
We then moved onto our favourite activities - STEM and Science experiments. The kids had a blast creating and experimenting with slime, goop, lava lamps and fizzy sherbet! 😝

Just a reminder, registrations are still open. If you have a child who is 3-6 years old and would benefit from learning in a classroom environment then our school readiness program is definitely what you are looking for. Please get in touch with us via private message or call us on 0406 677 807 to find out how we can help prepare your child for school. We’re here to make a difference. 🤗

The excitement continued in this week’s school holiday program with an Art session and some Summer Fun! 🤗 Our young artists had the opportunity to explore art and engage their senses. We observed two famous artists (Picasso and Monet) and some of their work in order to provide a unique way to teach the children about basic art techniques and different mediums.
Look at the amazing pieces of art they produced on canvas, using playdough and on the cookies they baked. 😋
The children then enjoyed participating in a few of our favourite summertime activities!😎
We made refreshing watermelon and berry ice-blocks, then searched and explored the different seashells found in the sand, before making beautiful sculptures with them! 🏖

It’s almost that time again - back to school. 🙌 Our Pre Kindy School Readiness Program registrations is now open and will commence Monday, 31st January. Session times will run from Monday to Friday from 10am to 1pm and Tuesday to Thursday from 1:30pm to 4:30pm. The option to do both sessions in a day is also available. To register your child or to find out more, simply send us a message or call us on 0406 677 807. Let us help kick start your child’s learning journey. 🤗

First week of school holidays was a blast with our Junior MasterChef and Indoor Camping themed sessions.
Our little chefs in the making enjoyed creating their own pizzas, blindfold tastings that tested their senses and an orange juice pressure test competition to see which team can squeeze and fill their cup the fastest. 👩‍🍳🧑‍🍳🍕🍊
The children were then welcomed into CAMP TAKE OFF!! 🚀 It was a day filled with wonderful storytelling under the starry night sky, shadow puppets, binocular making and Smores baking. They also used their binoculars for the scavenger hunt, finding all the hidden insects and snakes. That was so much fun! 🏕🌌🥰

We’re just days away from our popular School Holiday Program and it’s not too late to have your child join.
To find out all the info, simply send us a message or call us on 0406 677 807 to book your child’s spot today! 🤗

Our popular School Holiday Program for ages 3-6 is back with lots of fun filled themed STEM, cooking and craft activities. Sessions will run for 3 weeks over January from 10am to 1pm and each session is $45. To find out more or to book your child’s spot, please send us a private message or call us on 0406 677 807. We can’t wait to get the fun learning started these holidays! 🙌🥳

- throwback to when our awesome pre-kindy children participated in some Halloween fun and caldron bubbles! 🎃

Bubbles, boats and balloons...
With so many wonderful items beginning with B, we had a lot of fun introducing the letter/sound to our wonderful pre-kindy children. The children had a ball creating beautiful bubble paintings by using just a little bit of dish soap, dye and blowing power. There was bubbles, bubbles everywhere! They looked amazing.🤩
The children also made bubble mixture of their own so they could produce big bubbles out of the chenille stems they shaped. They also created small bubbles whilst using the blender to make banana smoothies and blueberry yoghurt pops. Yummo! 😋🍌🫐
We moved onto our science activities which were based upon the lovely story ‘Who sank the boat’ by Pamela Allen. We introduced the children to the concept sink and float and included a fun STEM challenge where they worked in pairs to design and build a boat that will float. We were so impressed by their creativity. 👏

It sure has been a busy start to Term 4 as we went straight back into it and focused on revising last terms letters. It was great to see most of our pre-kindy children were able to identify and sound the letters with confidence which allowed us to take the next step and begin turning them into the next phonic skill - CVC words. The children learnt how to segment and blend sounds in the CVC words DOG, CAT and PET. We found the best way to teach those words was through play and we managed to cover lots of stories, craft, cooking, STEM activities and we even had a little furry guest! 🐇🐕🐈‍⬛

We’re just days away from the start of Term 4 and we’re super excited to get back in the classroom for some key learning and fun activities - just as we did with our pre-kindy children in Term 3! 😍 One of the letters we focused on was the letter C and the children were able to learn about clouds ☁️🌧 and the much loved story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛

Book week is a great event for kids to celebrate their love of reading, their favourite characters and authors. 📗📘 We loved focusing on some of our class favourites and adding activities to go with our treasured books which helps the children build connections and extend on the meaning of the story. We appreciated the children bringing in their wonderful books and sharing them with us! 🥰

The Olympics may have come and gone but we sure did put on our very own show at the time. What better way to embrace the spirit and build knowledge in the children than with an Olympic-themed week.
We learnt the meaning behind the Olympic flag and what the colours and rings represent. We created our very own classroom flag by using the children’s painted hand prints. This was a beautiful way to also touch on unity of the 5 continents and colours that appear on all the national flags of the world. 🌏 The children also made their own torches and were excited to participate in not only the torch relay race, but in some of the Olympic sporting games. It was also important to show the children that we don’t have to be world-class athletes to have world-class fun in the classroom, it was all about sportsmanship and doing your best! For their amazing effort, we baked the perfect medal treats to celebrate as they are all winners here!👏🏅

Our pre-kindy program covers a range of learning, including science. We took the opportunity during National Science Week to learn all about this year's topic; Food: different by design. It honours the UNs International year of the fruits and vegetables. It was the perfect time for us to cover the letter/phonogram Gg, as we explored the process of where food comes from, the work involved and how it gets from seed to table. 🥕🥔🍓🍏 The children also worked together to create a beautiful poster displaying the 4 important things a plant needs for it to grow, the different types of plants that our fruits grow on and also which vegetables and fruit grow either above or below the ground. We also discussed and analysed different types of seeds, made some delicious garden salad and grew our very own lettuce and watched them grow throughout the term. 🪴🥬
This had the children thinking - how does your garden grow?

Its been a while so we thought we'd post a little something to show how our wonderful Pre-Kindy kids are doing... I think the smile says it all! 😁🥰

Our holiday program kicked off this week with 2 amazing sessions focusing on winter themed activities and science experiments. Our pre-kindy children enjoyed the variety of fun and exciting activities which included making snow, snowmen⛄️, learning all about snowflakes ❄️, the four seasons, weather changes and made refreshing orange juice after our long discussion on fruits and in which seasons we eat them.🍊
Our 2nd session was all about science. 👩‍🔬 We experimented with white roses in coloured water, played with fun puffy paint, made our own play-doh and enjoyed the pièce de rèsistance balloon activity. 🎈We then mixed colours in milk, made natural strawberry/coconut yoghurt & organic honey treats and ended with designing our ‘I Love Science’ poster with balloons. It was a fun filled learning and we can’t wait to do it all again next week! 🥳🤗

Our pre-kindy children made mini pizzas and turned pancakes into little piggys! ☺️ We just love that they enjoy cooking fun and delicious dishes. It is known that hands on cooking activities helps the children develop confidence and skills! 😋

Dress-ups and show & tell - we consolidated the letter P with fun dress-ups. The kids looked so adorable and we just loved how creative they got, what they wore and brought with them! 🥰

Penguins, polar bears, puppets and our science and STEAM experiment with popcorn got our little pre-kindy children excited to learn the letter P. They had fun making the cute crafts, mural and completing the maths activities. We introduced numbered iceberg path to help with physical activity and the revising of 8 numbers. The children also had a better understanding of the 5 senses (sight, smell, sound, touch and taste) once finishing the popcorn experiment. They were amazed to see how it changed from a kernel to a fluffy white popcorn. We also experimented with vinegar and baking soda to cause a chemical reaction to get our popcorn dancing - now that was so coooool! 🙊🍿. We finished off by making polar bear pretzels which were almost too cute to eat! 🐻‍❄️☺️🥰

Meet Buddy - our class pet who has been with us from the beginning. Each week Buddy goes on a little adventure and spends time with the family of one of our pre-kindy children. We just love hearing their experiences and seeing wonderful photos in Buddy’s journal. Thank you for taking good care of him and we can’t wait to see what else he gets up to! Hehe 🐶🥰

Shapes, colours, numbers and term 1 phonic letters/sounds were all on our list recently. It was great to revisit all our learnings and also touch on phonics word families which are groups of words that have similar letter patterns. By learning just one pattern, the children can learn many words at the same time. We used letters A and N to introduce words like Man and Fan. The children created cute crafts to match and made vegan gingerbread man! 🧍‍♂️😋

We’re pretty certain our pre-kindy children love show and tell time (and our book corner). 📚☺️🥰

When there are so many fun activities starting with the letter N, we just had to continue on. We focused on numbers, maths activities using little eggs placing them in nests, made night owls, some delicious and healthy nut balls, cute numbats and built a birds nest after watching a quick video clip - now that nest was very fiddly but we managed to get there in the end. 👏

Turning the letter N in to ninja turtles, little ninjas, night sky and necklaces. We just love our crafts which helps our pre-kindy children focus on the letter/sound of the week, strengthen their hand/eye coordination, patience and fine motor skills. We also incorporated numbers in to the mix with the children adding stars to our numbered night sky and built the number 7 out of playdoh. 🤗

A great way to build confidence in public speaking - it’s show and tell time! ☺️🥰

Happy Mother’s Day from our sweet pre-kindy children. 🥰 They made a beautiful necklace out of salt dough 😱 and some artwork to show mum just how much they love them! Aww, they melt our hearts! ☺️♥️

Another fun activity as we incorporated numbers with our insect theme. We focused on the number 6, tracing it on the worksheet and using playdoh. We then visited numbers up to 10 by rolling a dice and painting a numbered caterpillar. 🐛

Our little stars ⭐️ have been very busy recently getting to know the letter “i”. They enjoyed all the fun activities which included our 2 experiments with ice-cream and insect on ice, our insect mural and food (butterfly) projects, the “i” worksheets and of course, we can’t go past an insect song and dance. Can you tell it was all about the insects? 🐜🐝🦋🙃

Happy Monday everyone! 🤗

We start our morning with encouraging our pre-kindy children to share stories of what they did over the weekend. This is a great way to build their confidence and make them feel comfortable speaking in front of a small group. 🙌🥰

Our second School Holiday Program was the Painting Workshop for our primary students where they took inspiration from world known artists like Monet, Ken Done and Andy Warhol. The students were amazed by these masterpieces and this was demonstrated in their artwork. Bravo! 👏🎨🤩

Our Pre-Kindy School Holiday Program was such a massive hit that we just had to share this post with you all. We had so much fun learning all about the moon, stars, rockets, rainbows and colours. Our wonderful students even managed to create their own fizzy moon rock, tin foil moon, fruit rockets, mini rockets, coloured salt jars and they even baked a delicious coloured marble cake. Wow! That’s so impressive. What amazing little stars! 👏⭐️🤩

Goodbye school holidays, hello Term 2! 👋 We’re super excited to welcome back our wonderful students and also meet new faces. 🥳 We have a few spots still available in our popular pre-kindy program so get in touch to find out how to register your child today!
We can’t wait for some fun learning. 🙃🤗

Next up - the first school holiday workshop for our primary school kids that took place today with the kids baking pinata cookies! Yummo! 😋 They read and followed a recipe, measured ingredients, baked and decorated their cookies in their own special way. 🥰 We can’t wait to see the unique artwork they come up with next week! 🙌

Our first school holiday pre-kindy program kicked off yesterday and it was a Dino-riffic Day! 🦕😆 It was filled with fun, lots of learning and cool activities. We learnt all about dinosaurs, got creative, baked fossil cookies, did the Dino dance and last but not least, experimented with an exploding volcano. 🌋 Now that was pretty awesome. The kids were astonished. 😱🙃 We can’t wait for next week’s session on 12th April.

In case you missed it and have no plans for the kids these school holidays, we have 2 fun filled programs running for both primary school and pre-kindy kids. Keep the kids entertained while you take a much deserved break. 🙈 See our pinned post on Facebook for more details or send us a message! 🤗