Active Explorers Tai Tapu

A spook-tacular day for a fun dress up and being a little silly. Happy Halloween everyone.

Our extra-curricular activities include uku - manipulating clay, from the earth. Today we got our hands messy and a little stronger to hold our pencils a little tighter.

Instead of focusing on making your child’s life easier, help them to recognise they are capable of handling hard things.
-Dr Siggie

A game of bingo offers numerous cognitive and social benefits, including improved memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills.

Playing with water not only keeps your tamariki feeling cool, but you may be surprised to learn that water play has so many amazing benefits for early childhood development, contributing to various developmental milestones. Such milestones include the development of fine motor skills, cognitive growth, social interaction, and emotional regulation, making it one of the most popular activities in early childhood education.

There’s no substitution for hands-on exploration. Letting tamariki (safely) experiment with real tools, such as a glue gun, provides opportunities to build confidence, independence, creative thinking skills and much more.

Whether bringing an idea to life using craft materials or just learning how a tool like a glue gun works, tamariki see many benefits as they are allowed to lead, learn and explore freely

Hammer and nails develop fine and gross motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and muscle control, which are essential for writing.

This activity also builds focus, persistence, and confidence, and allows children to safely explore "risky play" while learning to judge risk for themselves

Simple jigsaw puzzles help tamariki develop finger strength, perseverance and problem-solving skills.

By supporting them to turn, flip, slide and wriggle pieces into position. Picking up, moving and twisting the pieces of a puzzle helps tamariki to develop finger strength and hand-eye coordination. While they pick up and position pieces, they also develop small-muscle control in their fingers.

Playing with these puzzles encourage Tamariki to look at pictures more carefully, going over them from top to bottom and from left to right. Through doing this, they may begin to notice visual similarities and differences.

The experience of completing a puzzle can also help tamariki to learn to accept challenges, overcome problems and deal with frustrations.

Copying shapes and patterns support tamariki by fostering mathematical reasoning, spatial skills, and higher-level cognitive abilities like problem-solving and logical thinking.

This activity develops visual-motor integration, important for handwriting, and improves pattern recognition for future learning, including predicting and making logical connections

Painting with household objects provides tamariki with sensory and fine motor skill development, fosters creativity and emotional expression, and enhances problem-solving and concentration skills.

By exploring different textures and using various objects as tools, toddlers build muscle strength, hand-eye coordination, and a better grip, which are crucial for writing and other later-life skills. This activity is also a tactile and visual experience that helps with language development.

Bringing our numbers and letters to life with our senses