GAP
Practical guidance, family resources and everyday moments connected to German-language early learning through GAP Playschool.
These posts help families understand the rhythm, routines, culture and community around early childhood learning at Spielwelt.
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Prepare Your Home School
Here are a few staples that it would be great for each child to have at their home-school. The basics: crayons (wax crayons; don’t go with oil pastels as you will never get it off your carpet/walls/furniture/work clothes/dog’s fur) pencil crayons (the little tiny packs you get on airplanes are rubbish… invest in 12 or…
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Rest Time is Important
Want to maintain a GAP-like routine at home at rest time? (Hint: The correct answer is yes! It will keep you and your children SANE!) The GAP children are used to listening to 40 minutes from our Ruhezeit (rest time) playlist at rest time every day. It is their cue to lie down and relax.…
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Going on a Bear Hunt
Looking for some extra fun while you are walking in your neighborhood? Perhaps you and Oma and Opa would like to join in the fun while staying safe indoors, too. Pop a teddy bear (or a few of them) in your window, and walk around the neighbourhood in the coming days and see if you can…
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Setting Routines at home
Here are our tips for setting a routine at home, now that the family are working and schooling from home. * Set a routine schedule for the kids; it helps make things predictable for the children. * Communicate with your partner and share the workloads: one of you works (the paid work) while the other…
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We love the Arboretum.
We love the Arboretum so much, we have been a couple of times this year. We even helped launch their new network of trails and discovered there is more to the Arboretum than the fabulous acorn playground. We scrambled over big boulders and up the sides of steep hills, adventured into forests we hadn’t seen…
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The joys of volunteering
We really appreciate our volunteers at Spielwelt. Our parents (and of course the children) are what make our community so wonderful. While the organisation certainly benefits from volunteers, it would seem that the volunteers benefit themselves. For example: Each term, a parent volunteers to wash the hand towels for us. (We save trees and give…
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Haig Park Nature Playground
We absolutely adore the new nature playground that has been installed in Haig Park as part of the Haig Park Experiments. We really hope it is allowed to stay. Please urge the ACT government to let this amazing nature playground stay here in Haig Park. It’s awesome. And ask them to build more of these…
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German Story Night 2019
Story Night was another lovely event at Spielwelt this year. Children and their families enjoyed sharing delicious food for dinner, while chatting and playing in the playground. We then moved indoors for the main attraction: the songs and stories. Paul got us all singing “Meine Haende sind verschwunden”, with the actions of course, and accompanied…
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Twinkle toes artists
The children at the GAP got to enjoy some artistic experiences as usual last week, but this time only using their feet. Imagine using your toes to paint, hold a paint brush, or try to knead and shape play dough! It provoked lots of conversation and was a lot of fun too.
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A Fair Chomp
Some of the children at the GAP joined their teacher Lisa-Marie starring in an ActSmart video to share one of our tips about being green. By replacing our old bar heaters for more efficient reverse cycle heaters, we have reduced our carbon footprint and now save ourselves over $1000 a year. As our young GAP…