Monthly Archives: November 2013

Learning about bearded dragons

Posted on by under Early Learning, Enquiry & Discovery, movement & physical learning, The Natural Environment

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Katie is an American PhD student from Melbourne University who has been studying bearded dragons in the Mallee around Walpeup – Mrs Leach asked her if she could come in and tell us about them. She came on Monday. We learnt a lot! Sandy brought his Reptiles of Australia book in as well, which was very interesting.

Bearded dragons only live in Australia – so Katie had to come from America to see and study them!

We had a picture of a bearded dragon to use – everyone thought about where the dragon might live – because they use camouflage to hide from their enemies – so the ones that live in the Centre of Australia have redder coloring than the ones that live in the yellow sands of the Mallee.

They thought about what time of day it might be – because they change color if they want to warm up, in the morning, or cool down in the middle of the day.

They eat insects – so they have to be very still and then move quickly.

They dig burrows for themselves to sleep in at night time but some of the lazy ones might sleep in a rabbit’s burrow – lots of children drew lazy dragons!

And they do special dances – they wave their arms slowly if they are not going to fight – and the boss dragons will nod to show that they aren’t going to fight. (we practised being dragons and did a dragon dance later on!)

But if they do want to fight, their beards turn black and they suck in air to puff their beards up.

Their enemies are foxes and cats, bigger lizards and birds like wedge tail eagles.

Here is Milly’s drqgon…061

helping out with online research

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I received this message and am passing it on for anyone who might be able to help out.

Hi there!!
Do you want to help young children have the best possible start to life?
Do you have a child aged 2-5 years who hasn’t yet started school? If so, we’d love to hear from you. The Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research at Deakin University in Melbourne (http://www.deakin.edu.au/health/cpan/)  is running a really important research project. We’re interested in active play and electronic media use in 2-5 year old children. We’d love it if you could help us out by taking our online survey.
What’s it all about? Our project – Mums, Dads and Kids – is investigating how active young children are, how much time they spend using electronic media and how these behaviours impact some aspects of their development. We’re also really interested in what parents think about how these behaviours might impact on their child’s health, growth and development. There is such little research in this area that we really have very little understanding of how to best support healthy growth and development for our young children. One of the main aims of this project is to get a better understanding of the issues being studied so that we can develop programs and policies which best support a really healthy start to life for our little children.
What do you have to do? It’s really simple! We are asking mums and dads of 2-5 year old children to take our online survey. It’s easy – just click on the link
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/healthykidsdeakinsurvey
and it will take you to our initial screening survey. This will take only 2-3 minutes of your time. Once you’ve completed that, we can email you your own specific link for our full survey which will take between 10-20 minutes of your time, depending on your answers. Once the project is finished, we will be happy to share with you some of the results if you would like to receive them. If you’re on Facebook, we would also love it if you could like our project page
(https://www.facebook.com/healthykidsdeakin?ref=hl) and share it with your friends.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact Jen at healthykids@deakin.edu.au or +61 3 9244 6278.
Thanks!!
Jennifer McCann

John Deere artists

Posted on by under learning about our community, learning dispositions, Learning through play

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With harvest coming up, we have had lots of conversations about the machinery being used. So the heavy farm machinery has had to come out and the farmers have swung into action. Today we asked if they would like to draw their machines and Ollie, Bayley and Boden had a go.   This was quite challenging and Bayley said – he thought it would be hard. Mrs Bell said, “well maybe start with the wheels” and that made it easier – he ended up putting in more details as he looked harder.

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