Speak for our park

This year the children of Elizabeth Chifley Presbyterian Preschoolin Bathurst have been inspired by many interests across our four classes, which rangein ages from 3-5 year oldchildren, to create a combined 3D garden art work entry titled Spark for our Park.These art works will be placed in our playground.Our preschool has an established and extensive recycling program so some items used in the creation of the artworks were sourced from within our serviceand we put the call out to our families and staff to start collecting a variety of different sized cans to work with too.We used steel and aluminium cans, acrylic paints, yogurt lids,reclaimed stainless steel parts, recycled coffee pods, wire, glue and screws, reclaimed wood pieces, wool, felt and glitter to create our art works.Our youngest children, the Koala class, have a love and interest in rainbowswhich has been evident in their paintings and drawings. They have alsolearnt to sing and sign in Auslan ‘I can sing a rainbow’.The Pathfinders class have enjoyed creating robotsusing a variety of mediums to cardboard boxes, geometric paper shapes, and painting and drawing robots too. Our creation of our ‘robot like’ Scarecrow evolved as we discussed what we could create for our garden to add colour and fun! We looked at many pictures of traditional ‘scarecrows’. One of our clever Dads made the stand for our masterpiece which will be displayed permanently beside our vegetable garden and will hopefully scare the birds away from eating our produce. We also had fun making beesand lady beetleswhich will decorate our recently established sensory garden. The Joeys class have had fun winding wool and reusing coffee pods on theircans to create owlsof different sizes which will also be placed in our playground trees. These owls were inspired by one of our favourite children’s stories at preschool titled ‘Owl Babies’ by Martin Waddell.And finally, our Bumble Bee class has enjoyeddesigning and creating wind chimesand other garden creatures to adornour playground and garden areas too.