Tag: Nurturing

Nevaeh’s Recent Highlights

Nevaeh has had a fun and busy couple of weeks since our last update, with lots of engaging moments across play, learning, and interaction with peers.

In PE, Nevaeh joined in enthusiastically and showed some excellent kicking skills throughout the session. It was great to see her confidence and enjoyment during physical activity.

Her connection with Baby continues to be a strong source of interest and motivation. Nevaeh is still very much enjoying caring for Baby, including putting Baby to bed. As always, she made sure to test the bottle first herself—showing her ongoing nurturing and playful “mama” role in her play. In the coming weeks, we are planning to introduce bath time for Baby as another step in her play routine, to see how Nevaeh responds and engages with this new caregiving scenario.

Nevaeh has also been developing her early writing and communication skills. She has been practicing holding pens and using the whiteboard, with a focus on naming people and recognising the letter “N,” especially in relation to her own name.

A lovely idea from Olivia helped extend Nevaeh’s engagement with music—placing the Spa Mirror in front of the piano so she could see herself while playing. Nevaeh absolutely loved this and was highly engaged during piano time. In her lesson with Marilyn, she also showed great progress with two-handed piano playing, including using her thumbs more intentionally.

Alongside this, Nevaeh continues to explore colours and numbers and shows a strong interest in sensory books from the visual resource library in Christchurch. These resources remain a valuable part of her learning experience.

Socially, Nevaeh is spending more time with her classmates, who are increasingly showing interest in connecting with her and sharing experiences. This growing peer engagement is a positive step in her classroom relationships.

Looking ahead, we will be organising peer reading sessions and a small peer drum circle. These activities will give Nevaeh further opportunities to interact with her classmates through shared reading and music-making, and we are interested to see how she responds to these more collaborative experiences.

Caring, Connecting, and Cross Country

We’re already into week three of the term, and it’s hard to believe how quickly the time is flying by.

This week we’ve included a photo of Nevaeh’s special wall in her classroom, which helps her peers see what she’s been up to throughout the day, as mentioned in a previous post.

One thing we’ve really noticed lately is how naturally drawn Nevaeh is to nurturing and caring for babies. We’ve been leaning into this interest as an opportunity to build on those lovely innate caregiving skills. With some dolls, a crib, stroller, and other baby items added into the space, it’s been an absolute hit. When Nevaeh first saw the crib, she immediately went over, said “sleep,” and carefully tucked the baby into bed. Such a cool moment to witness.

Nevaeh is also forming some really nice friendships with Jackson and Dakota, which has been wonderful to see grow over the past few weeks.

She’s also been doing some practice for cross country, which was a great lead-up to yesterday’s event. Nevaeh completed her lap in the sunshine and absolutely loved it.

Olivia has also been doing some fantastic work with Nevaeh using the mirror to support conversations around body parts, integrating lots of speech and language opportunities while focusing on identification and communication.

I’ve honestly been so impressed by everything Olivia and Jackie have been doing to support Nevaeh while we are without specialists. From physio and occupational therapy through to speech and language support, they’ve both done an incredible job making sure Nevaeh’s needs continue to be well met. Thank you so much, ladies.