Natural Play Children's Centre in Berry, New South Wales | School

Natural Play Children's Centre

Locality: Berry, New South Wales

Phone: +61 2 4464 2851

Address: 35 Clarence St 2535 Berry, NSW, Australia

Website: http://naturalplaychildrenscentre.com.au

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• Childcare service
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25.01.2022 Hi everyone! The Natural Play Team are deeply touched by the amount of inquiries we have been receiving over the past few weeks about our waitlist, we have been receiving all of your messages & will be in touch as soon as possible. At current, we are at full capacity and have no available spaces. We will recommence tours once current circumstances have eased.... If you are wanting to jump on the wait list please goto http://naturalplaycc.hubworks.com.au/ And goto the ‘waitlist’ link. For all other inquiries, Mel is in the office from 2:30 -3:30 pm. Hope you are all safe and well x

25.01.2022 #Parenting is hard work. Victoria Prooday is a registered occupational therapist, psychotherapist and educator on modern-day parenting, specialising in the impa...cts of high-tech lifestyles on children's #nervous #systems. She has a strong belief that the first step towards helping children is by helping their parents. Much of the disconnection that parents experience with children today stems from the normalisation of technology-use at young ages. One in four children under the age of two years old owns their own iPad or tablet. Into this modern era, Victoria explains that the #brain is like a muscle that, if properly exercised and provided with the nurturing and balanced environment, can experience tremendous growth and change. Raising #children in the modern world of overabundance is becoming more and more challenging. Victoria writes There is a silent tragedy developing right now, in our homes, and it concerns our most precious jewels - our children. Through my work with hundreds of children and families as an occupational therapist, I have witnessed this tragedy unfolding right in front of my eyes. Our children are in a devastating emotional state. It is scientifically proven that the brain has the capacity to rewire itself through the environment. Yes, there are and always have been children who are born with disabilities and despite their parents’ best efforts to provide them with a well-balanced environment and parenting, their children continue to struggle. These are NOT the children I am talking about here. [There is a] 37% increase in teen #depression [and a] 100% increase in #suicide rate in kids 10 to 14 years old. Our children pay for the loss of well-balanced childhood with their emotional well-being. If we want our children to grow into happy and healthy individuals, we have to wake up and go back to the basics. It is still possible. The following advice focuses on families unaffected by neurobiological conditions or physiological effects of trauma, although all families may find a few relevant straight-forward reminders of parenting wisdom among Victoria's insights, depending on the age of your child. Her guidance as an occupational therapist and psychotherapist on how parents can collectively improve the emotional well-being of today's children reads as follows Set limits and remember that you are your child’s parent. Offer kids a well-balanced lifestyle filled with what kids NEED, not just what they WANT. Don’t be afraid to say No to your kids if what they want is not what they need: Provide nutritious food and limit junk food. Spend at least one hour a day in green space: biking, hiking, fishing, or watching birds or insects. Have a daily technology-free family dinner. Play one board game a day. Involve your child in at least one chore a day (folding laundry, tidying up toys, hanging clothes, unpacking groceries, setting the table etc). Implement a consistent sleep routine to ensure that your child gets lots of sleep in a technology-free bedroom. Teach responsibility and independence. Don’t over-protect them from small failures. It trains them in the skills needed to overcome life's greater challenges: Don’t pack your child’s backpack, don’t carry their backpack, don’t bring to school their forgotten homework, and don’t peel a banana for a 5-year-old child. Teach them the skills rather than doing it for them. Teach delayed gratification and provide opportunities for boredom as boredom is the time when creativity awakens: Don’t feel responsible for being your child’s entertainment crew. Do not use technology as a cure for boredom. Avoid using technology during meals, in cars, restaurants and malls. Use these moments as opportunities to train their brains to function under boredom. Help them create a boredom first aid kit with activity ideas for I am bored times. Be emotionally available to connect with kids and teach them self-regulation and social skills: Turn off your phones until kids are in bed to avoid digital distraction. Become your child’s emotional coach. Teach them to recognise and deal with frustration and anger. Teach greeting, turn taking, sharing, empathy, table manners, and conversation skills. Connect emotionally smile, hug, kiss, tickle, read, dance, jump, or crawl with your child. You can read Victoria Prooday's blog at https://yourOT.com/parenting-club #neurochild #reconnect #familygoals

24.01.2022 #amovingchildisalearningchild #movingsmart #movementdrivesthinking

24.01.2022 N E W Y E A R N E W R E S O U R C E S Everything you see here are brand new, quality resources to inspire and intrigue our brilliant little minds! Providing beautiful quality resources for our children offers a wider range of learning opportunities and possibilities to be explored We don't know who's more excited about our recent additions! Educators or Children?

23.01.2022 "School preparation isn’t simply the miniaturization of sedentary schooling. It doesn’t look like tiny children sitting in tiny rows writing on tiny papers. Preparing children to succeed in school looks like active children running, climbing, dancing, squeezing, squishing, grabbing, holding, skipping, rolling, and swinging through childhood. Those children will have more fully developed brains and more fully developed bodies, fully ready to continue learning."

22.01.2022 This weeks pretend play in the hut The Pink Up Florist We have been enjoying answering the phone of our busy flower shop, using the till exchanging flowers for money, and creating beautiful bunches of flowers to sell. Throughout this experience, the children have shown wonderful turn taking skills, negotiation, great communication and mathematical knowledge! If you are coming in to NP please don’t forget to add a gold coin donation to our donation box in the foyer for #pinkupberry this month

22.01.2022 "Electronic toys for infants that produce lights, words and songs were associated with decreased quantity and quality of language compared to playing with books or traditional toys such as a wooden puzzle, a shape-sorter and a set of rubber blocks, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics."

21.01.2022 This is a great little read! https://www.yourmodernfamily.com/barefoot-kids/

20.01.2022 April is Autism Acceptance Month! "Please don't force me to fit in, include me while I Am different"

20.01.2022 Last week was National Science Week and Natural Play celebrated with a bang at the Science Space in Wollongong! Destination Moon was the theme for this year and what better way to explore this concept than with a 'Perfect Little Planet' show and stargazing in the Planetarium, followed by free exploration across a wide range of exhibits and finishing off with a 'Bubbles and Balloons' show, complete with liquid nitrogen bubbles! We all had such a wonderful time and would like to say a massive thank you to the team at Science Space for making our visit so magical. We have certainly returned home with a lot of new ideas and questions to continue exploring!

19.01.2022 Day 1 of our Annual Christmas Market! We are feeling the Joy here at Natural Play and can’t wait to share with our families everything the children (and educators) have been creating!!

18.01.2022 This weeks pretend play in the hut The Pink Up Florist We have been enjoying answering the phone of our busy flower shop, using the till exchanging flowers for money, and creating beautiful bunches of flowers to sell. Throughout this experience, the children have shown wonderful turn taking skills, negotiation, great communication and mathematical knowledge! If you are coming in to NP please don’t forget to add a gold coin donation to our donation box in the foyer for #pinkupberry this month

14.01.2022 It was a beautiful morning spent with some of our mums and bubs at Natural Play for our Mother's morning tea, with coffees all round of course! You all deserve to be appreciated every day

14.01.2022 Hello to families and followers of Natural Play, Over the past 8 months I have part of an incredible team of passionate educators and parents who are working to establish an independent Steiner school in the Berry area. The team has been hard at work on the NESA application, which will need to be complete by March 2020 in order for the school to open in 2021. We are now close to securing a location and fingers crossed we'll have a property to take to council at the end of thi...s month to begin the approval processes. For now, we need your help: As part of the NESA application we need to provide projected enrolments for the first 3 years of operation. This is literally a table with numbers, so no names or other personal details will be included. We are gathering enrolment projections for 2021, 2022 and 2023 and we are planning to start in 2021 with Kindy, Year 1 and Year 2 with subsequent year levels added in 2022 and 2023 to accommodate existing students (year 3 in 2022 and year 4 in 2023). Official enrolments can only take place when we are approved so we are after interest only at this stage. If you think you might send your kids to Green Mountain School, then please get in touch. You can send us a PM or email [email protected] If you know any other families that might be interested, please pass on our email address and ask them to contact us. More info is on our website www.greenmountainschool.com.au Otherwise, reach out if you have any questions! Thank you!

14.01.2022 Hello Families and Friends of Natural Play! We are raising money to help make a holistic, independent and community driven primary school a reality in the Berry Region. At present we need funds to register the school, cover legal fees and submit our application and every little bit helps! Thank you for helping to bring this project to life for our future generations

13.01.2022 N P C H R I S T M A S P A R T Y Shout out to our wonderful Educators who showed some serious hidden talents today!! Merry Christmas from all of us to our Natural Play families

13.01.2022 Perfect day for a tea party in the cubby

13.01.2022 Natural Play Children's Centre is looking very pretty in pink this month!! The children have all been very busy doing lots of pink arts, crafts and activitie...s Thank you for your support towards Pink Up Berry 2020, it is greatly appreciated! #pinkupberry2020 #pinkupberry #pinkupyourtown #breastcancerawarenessmonth #mcgrathfoundation #communityfriend McGrath Foundation South Coast Register WIN News Illawarra

11.01.2022 This is a great little read! https://www.yourmodernfamily.com/barefoot-kids/

10.01.2022 #play #learn #imagine #explore #create #wonder

10.01.2022 #play #learn #imagine #explore #create #wonder

09.01.2022 https://sydcatholicschools.nsw.edu.au//is-my-child-ready-f

08.01.2022 We believe that words do matter! Let the children explore and be inspired by their discoveries, our responsibility is to only guide positive behaviors without dampening their innate desires to learn!

07.01.2022 This year World Wildlife Day held its focus on marine animals and conservation of our oceans. In celebration of this event we spent some weeks studying marine life and to further extend on our knowledge we took our Preschool group to visit the Sydney Aquarium. We had such a wonderful time exploring each of the exhibits and having the opportunity to observe the creatures we had been learning about. Many thanks to the wonderful educators, parent volunteers and to Berry Bus Service for making this wonderful opportunity possible!

07.01.2022 In celebration of "Save a Spider Day", I made this cartoon! Spiders are very well known, yet tragically misunderstood. People jump at the chance to hate spider...s and people tend to lump ALL spiders into the DANGEROUS category. Spiders are magnificent creatures and help us in so many ways. MOST spiders are harmless and no spider wants to bite you. Spiders are shy creatures and they simply want to be left alone. Spiders rarely bite humans. Most mysterious bites we get are from other insects, but spiders often get the blame. There are over 40,000 spider species and of these, only about 12 are poisonous. I encourage you to take the time to observe a spider. They just might become less scary to you and they might even become a friend. Just a few of these amazing creatures: -PinkToe Tarantula. A South -American spider whose leg tips are pink. It is one of the few tarantulas that can climb trees and swim. -Goliath bird-eating tarantula, whose body can fill your palm and whose legs can stretch up to 12 inches across. it is the largest spider in the world by mass and size, but it is second to the giant huntsman spider by leg span. -Bagheera kiplingi is a species of jumping spider who survives mostly on plants. Its known as the Ghandi of spiders for its largely vegetarian lifestyle. Spiders are really good at killing "nuisance insects," like mosquitoes and aphids, so start seeing them as a friend, not a foe

06.01.2022 One of the reasons why hands on learning through play is so much more effective than any worksheet or explicit teaching method can ever be!

06.01.2022 Because EVERY day is a beautiful one! Rain, Hail or Shine there is always a new experience to be had and enjoyed in Natural Play's gorgeous yard...

05.01.2022 With Winter fast approaching, this to many can mean gearing up for cold and flu season! In the video below, Jessica Donovan discusses how expensive supplements are not always the answer and that immune boosting is only half the battle... we need to avoid the things that weaken the immune system and therefore increase our children's susceptibility to illness. Jessica identifies 3 things that can drastically increase our chances of getting sick this Winter and gives tips on how to avoid them. Well worth a listen!

04.01.2022 Imaginary worlds, real skills. Read more: https://wef.ch/2AwYr6e

03.01.2022 B E S T W I S H E S 2 0 2 0 N P G R A D S Thinking of our 19 Graduates of 2020! Wishing you the very best on your first day at school From all of us at Natural Play we will miss you all so very much

03.01.2022 Hi everyone! The Natural Play Team are deeply touched by the amount of inquiries we have been receiving over the past few weeks about our waitlist, we have been receiving all of your messages & will be in touch as soon as possible. At current, we are at full capacity and have no available spaces. We will recommence tours once current circumstances have eased.... If you are wanting to jump on the wait list please goto http://naturalplaycc.hubworks.com.au/ And goto the ‘waitlist’ link. For all other inquiries, Mel is in the office from 2:30 -3:30 pm. Hope you are all safe and well x

03.01.2022 ~Lest We Forget~ The children of Natural Play were so proud to lay the wreath they had created at the Berry War Memorial in memory of our fallen local heroes.

02.01.2022 Natural Play Children's Centre is looking very pretty in pink this month!! The children have all been very busy doing lots of pink arts, crafts and activitie...s Thank you for your support towards Pink Up Berry 2020, it is greatly appreciated! #pinkupberry2020 #pinkupberry #pinkupyourtown #breastcancerawarenessmonth #mcgrathfoundation #communityfriend McGrath Foundation South Coast Register WIN News Illawarra

02.01.2022 Perfect day for a bush walk! We love getting out in the rain and viewing things from a different perspective, everything looks so enchanting! You never know the amazing things you might come across in the bush. Today our friends found a lot of little (and big) treasures to bring back and take home to share with their families