Dragon’s Den Child Care

Happy Early Childhood Educator Appreciation Day!!
Here at Dragons Den, our staff believe in providing an inclusive, safe and happy environment where children strive to be their best selves! Our role is to encourage children to continuously learn about themselves and the world around them using a play based approach. This means, alongside the children, our wonderful educators are being sprayed by water guns, playing sports in the yard, joining dance parties and playing in mess!! By observing the children, educators provide activities and experiences where something new can always be learned. Something as simple as mud. We squeeze, pour, mix and scoop....great for prewriting skills, learning capacity science, learning weight in math, they learn to relax their mind by observing the mud, so many different levels of learning can happen together! Everyday we play, we create, we learn and we thrive TOGETHER!!
To all of our educators and to educators everywhere, we thank you for giving your heart every day 🫶🏼⭐️⭐️

Welcome to a sneak peek into some of our messy fun in the Den! 🔎🧑🏼‍🔬👩🏽‍🔬
We spent time learning about “Newtonian Fluids”, meaning that “Oobleck” is a thick fluid that is not constant when force is applied. It will sit solid when contained but when you push a finger into it, pick it up or drop a marble on top, it will become a liquid, sticky goop!
Working with different sensory materials allows children to develop communication skills, fine motor practice for writing, as well as observation and prediction making skills.

*Please note if you make this at home, pour the excess water in the drain and scrape into the garbage or allow to dry. The Oobleck can clog drains!*

Exploring our new invitations to play!!
Basket weaving and fabric designing highlights children’s fine motor skills, creativity and patience when creating alone or with each other. Being able to centre their focus on a task until it is completed allows the children to feel proud and accomplished of themelves. 🧵

Often, we really enjoy scooting over to a larger space to get our bodies movin’ even more. We brought our new obstacle course building set out. We climbed, jumped, balanced, crawled, tucked and so much more. Allowing the children to explore their bodies in challenging new ways gives them a new way to encourage themselves to take on new challenges with confidence and excitement. 🏃‍♂️ 🧗🏼‍♀️

We’re back! With a busy summer of adventures and the excitement of school beginning again, we’ve got caught up in our fun! Check out what we’ve been up to and some of our new play spaces to celebrate the upcoming and past holidays! 🪔🎄

The library put on an amazing Indigenous drumming experience for the children to observe. They learned how they make their drums, the symbolism behind them, what a round dance is and got to learn how to play their own drum! 🥁 🪶

Fun Fridays!
We gathered some special treasures for each of the children and buried them in our sand box! The children each got to dig, brush and discover their treasures! After lunch we hopped on our first city bus trip down to the library. We shared stories, songs and learned music together. We finished our big day with a trip to the indoor playground to exert our energy before the bus!! 🚎 🛝 🏖️

Lego Masters! 🧱

We spent a quieter morning challenging the children, “what can you create with one cup of Lego?”
Some of our children were chatting about what they were creating, “I’m building the back to the future car!”, “I’m building a rocket ship!” And some silently chose to work beside the others to create. This was great to inspire creative thinking, using STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), balancing, and keeping calm when a piece just doesn’t fit.

Summer days 🌞

Last week we kicked off our hot summer days with a water balloon fight and a slurpee to keep us cool. The children used communication to split themselves into teams, work together to fill their balloons and sponges and exert all their physical energy running, tagging and walking in the heat. We’re excited to have many more hot day adventures! 🔫💦🥤

Sprinkle Art🌞🧁

We gathered canvases, sprinkles, white glue and clear glue and opened the creativity to the children. Some drew out their ideas first, some went ahead and drew on the canvas and some went ahead with no sketch! We noticed the more glue we had, the more likely the sprinkles would melt together…creating a really pretty rainbow affect!

Movement madness!

We turned on some tunes, played some games, learned and watched a Powwow performance from one of our students and learned rhythmic gymnastics. We loved the way the ribbons looked when they were thrown in the air, we decided to find a partner and form a line to toss back and forth. We tried different ways to throw, spinning then throwing, overhand or underhand. We used teamwork, problem solving skills, trial and error and movement to make it the best dance party day! 🎊🎤