Manning Adventist Bush School

24/01/2024

09/11/2023

Kids Church is on this Saturday at Wingham Church, 1 Moon Street Wingham. There will be singing, an ice breaker & drama to keep the kids involved and engaged. Everyone is welcome, so please join us from 11am to 12pm.

29/11/2022

Beach School was a great success today. The children built dens and fortresses with the driftwood that was at Saltwater. One was even an underground shelter! We made sand globes, rock paint and mandelas. We explored the high tide mark and found cuttle fish, vertebrae, amazing corals and seaweed. Of course sand castles and carrying water to the castle only to see it run away was a fantastic learning opportunity.

This excerpt is from TES in the UK and talks about the reasons that beach school needs to be part of our bush school program:

Beach schools and bush school sessions place significant emphasis on holistic development and, as with the principles and overall benefits of forest school learning, have significant benefits on personal and social wellbeing, as well as providing incredible learning opportunities using minimal resources.

Beach schools tend to follow the same principles as forest schools, whereby children are encouraged to explore the natural environment with its constantly changing appearance, offerings, and potential learning experiences and opportunities.

The general idea of beach school session is to not “plan” or facilitate learning but rather to follow the children’s curiosity in their findings of the natural world and meet their learning and developmental needs through the invaluable opportunities the natural world has to offer.

We are very fortunate to be close to both the bush and the beach and can take advantage of both. Your children are experiencing learning unlike any other school in the Manning.

We hope that they are glowing when you ask them about what they did today. Thank you for supporting us in your children's learning journey.

03/08/2022

As part of our Bush School program, the students design and create STEM activities. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The older boys in Year 4-6 have been working on a mud dam. They have used available materials and have formed a dam using a block brick and lots of water, mud and rocks. This week, they decided they were going to work on a waterfall so they built up the walls of the dam, filled in the gaps in the block and then released the water to see how much would empty out of the reservoir. They were fully engaged in this task for an hour and were really proud of their efforts. There are so many skills being learnt here: cooperation, conversation and collaboration. Just another reason why we have our program for all ages, not just pre-school because big kids learn by doing too!

01/08/2022

Children who spend time out in nature are more enthusiastic about all things. Our time each week in our beautiful bush school setting is a favourite for all the children in our school. For us as facilitators, it is a time for us to get to know the students in a more wholistic way. We find that this relaxed and comfortable setting enables the students to talk to us more freely and it gives us the time to listen more intently to what they have to say. We are so lucky to have the only Bush School in the Manning run by trained practitioners.

24/05/2021

Our amazing Bush School shelter is almost completed. We are using it this weekend for our inaugural Bush School Camp. Our students will camp out in our beautiful Bush School area (or indoors if they wish) and spend the evening bush walking, playing glow in the dark soccer and cooking over the fire.

We would like to say thank you to our amazing builder, Saxon, from Mid-Coast Playgrounds who took our vision and created this awesome structure. We would also like to thank Andrew and his dad David from Rentatent who sewed, created and donated the canvas for us. You are awesome!

We are looking forward to having many years of joy, laughter and learning in our beautiful Bush School.

02/05/2021

Part of Bush School is free choice. The children are encouraged to explore and follow their interests. One of our favourite pursuits is our 4m x 4m tree hammock. The children love the gentle rocking and when they can; jump from one corner to the other. The hammock is hung in our forest each week. It has become quite worn from the constant use over the past two years and we are looking to replace it this year.
If you would like your children to be part of our amazing program, please contact the school as we have limited openings for 2022.

02/05/2021

This term the K-2 class has been learning about descriptive text. A descriptive text usually focuses on describing a single location, object, event, person, or place. It endeavours to engage all five of the reader's senses to evoke the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of the text's subject. We are making a book on fungus that is in our forest. We had to walk slowly and look carefully as fungus hides in sneaky places. We found some amazing colours and types. We are going to use our photos to make a fungus book this week.

02/05/2021

This term signals the start of our fire building. We began with popcorn and damper; two of our favourites. The children learnt how to cook damper on sticks. Perhaps the hardest part was waiting for the dough to cook. Children learn many things from this activity. They are respectful of the fire, they share and create their own food and they learn that honey tastes great poured into the hole left by the stick when the damper is cooked.