The Grange Early Learning Centre

Our Before School Literacy Programme is a fun and engaging way to help prepare tamariki for their school journey! 📚✏️

We focus on Jolly Phonics, supporting children to build confidence with letter sounds, listening skills, and phonological awareness through games, songs, stories, and hands-on learning experiences.

The children have been loving exploring sounds, actions, and beginning to recognise letters in a playful and meaningful way. 💛

We are so proud to support our little learners as they grow in confidence and develop a love for literacy before heading off to school!

Our Out & About adventure turned into a real-life treasure hunt! We were so lucky to come across a gentleman using a metal detector. The children were absolutely mesmerized, watching him carefully scan the ground and listening to the sounds of his machine. It was a fantastic lesson in patience and curiosity as they stood by, eagerly waiting to see what hidden gems he might find. The look of wonder on their faces was priceless.

The excitement continued when we encountered some of our local community helpers. We witnessed a busy scene with a fire in the area, which gave us the opportunity to watch firefighters and police officers in action. The children were wide-eyed as the emergency vehicles passed by, and it sparked some great conversations about the important work these brave people do to keep our community safe.

It feels incredibly fitting that Torin and Nora’s last "Out and About" with us was filled with such big adventures. Watching them explore, ask questions, and engage with the world around them has been a joy for all of us.

​We are so incredibly proud of the confident, curious children they have grown into, and while we will miss them dearly at daycare, we are so excited for their next big step. We wish Torin and Nora the very best of luck as they start their new journey at school this week—you are going to do amazing things!

What a joyful and creative time we’ve had celebrating Easter together!

Over the past few days, the tamariki have been busy exploring a range of fun, hands-on Easter activities. We began by painting beautiful bunny outlines, where the children expressed their creativity through colour, pattern, and design. It was wonderful to see each child’s unique interpretation come to life.

We also spent time making delicious hot cross buns. The children were actively involved in mixing, kneading, and shaping the dough, enjoying the sensory experience and working together as a team.

Adding to the festivities, the tamariki created their own Easter baskets, showing great care and pride in their work. These were perfect for collecting special treats during our much-anticipated Easter marshmallow hunt today.

Today’s hunt was filled with laughter, excitement, and lots of happy faces as the children searched high and low for hidden marshmallows. It was a lovely way to bring everyone together and celebrate the spirit of Easter.

Throughout these experiences, the children have been developing creativity, cooperation, and a sense of belonging within our learning environment.

Wishing all our whānau a safe and happy Easter! 🐣💛

This week was Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa (Samoa Language Week). We have enjoyed celebrating, learning and sharing our understanding of this vibrant Pasifika culture through music, dance and games.

Over the week we’ve learned greetings, shapes, the alphabet, colours and numbers through song alongside pasifika beats. Through art, we’ve reinforced these colours and learned about traditional art mediums and terms including siapo patterns. We tried otai (juice drink), we made beautiful 'ula fala necklaces and one of our wonderful parents brought in some panikeke for the children to try!

We have had an absolute blast together this week through these mediums learning and representing our knowledge together to engage with Turu 2 -establishing and maintaining collaborative and respectful relationships and professional behaviours that enhance learning and wellbeing for pacific learners (Tapasa). An ability to connect their learning in the ECE setting with experiences at home and in familiar cultural communities and a sense of themselves as global citizens. (Te Whariki)

Young children are naturally inquisitive, full of questions about the world around them and the drive to investigate how things work. We, as teachers, should take advantage of this innate curiosity and start channelling their enthusiasm for scientific discovery as early on as possible.

Catapults were mighty handy for pirates in the golden age of piracy (during the 17th century). Our science experiment was testing out our own catapults and seeing how far we could land our cotton balls.

We used teamwork to create our catapult out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Then we glued a milk bottle top on and we were ready to go! The children had a few practice shots before the competition began. It took a little bit of practice to be able to get the right amount of pressure on the bottle cap but everyone did such a great job!

We learnt that when you bend your stick, you load your launching stick up with energy. When you let go, this energy is released and converted to energy of motion. Most of this energy transfers to the cotton ball, which shoots through the air.

Fairy Flakes joined us at the park for our Christmas party this year. The tamariki had lots of fun watching her magic tricks and waiting patiently for a balloon animal. We hope you all had lots of fun!

This month the children have been very busy making lots of presents for their loved ones. They worked very hard and were quite proud of what they had made and even more proud to hand them out.

From all of us here at The Grange, we wish you all a Merry Christmas!

December so far has been full of lots of different activities - Christmas art and craft and lots of water play to keep us cool!

Wow, what a maths week it has been! Digging into our tamariki's sense of adventure, we extended their maths learning this week through many different activities. Ahoy! We dug for numbered treasure, we created our own treasure maps, we did some treasure counting. Then a pirate left behind his broken up treasure map and hat! Tamariki practiced teamwork to piece the map together, and off they went to find some treasure! Better luck next time pirate, our tamariki are too smart for you!

Happy Father's Day to all the amazing dads, father figures, and male role models out there. Your love and support make a difference!

“My dad plays with me all the time. It’s so much fun” - Z
“My dad takes me to the park sometimes. We go on the swing and sometimes down the slide” - J
“I love my daddy because he’s my daddy and he’s special” - L
“I love my daddy because he gives me lollies on the way home” - T

We hope you all have an amazing weekend!

Happy Mother's Day to all our amazing mothers and caregivers!

Today and every day, we celebrate the love, care, and dedication you bring to your children's lives. We're grateful for the partnership we share in supporting our young learners' growth and development.

Let's cherish the moments we share with our tamariki and acknowledge the hard work that goes into nurturing our future generations.

We wish you a joyful and relaxing Mother's Day!

“When is the Easter bunny coming?”, “How long until the Easter bunny comes?” were just a few of the questions our tamariki had yesterday morning.
While the children were busy eating their morning tea, the Easter bunny hopped into the playground and hid some eggs for the children.

The children very excitedly ran downstairs with their little Easter baskets in hand. They were surprisingly very quick at finding all the eggs!

We wish everyone a safe and happy Easter holiday!