Avenues Early Learning
Bush Track!
Let’s go on a bush track adventure! We based our bush track experience off the book ‘Bush Tracks’ written by Ros Moriarty.
The Pre Kindy children from Avenues Early Learning Centre Carina started off with tracking the kangaroo tracks up the steep ‘rocky hill’! The children were getting in the head space of a kangaroo, so we jumped together just like they would! The children used their gross motor and balancing skills to make it across the ‘rocky hill’ and to continue to follow the tracks. The children spotted the kangaroo’s hiding on our worm farm! We then saw that they had left us a gift! In the next page of our book, we read about how the Aboriginal People would create their own spears, lucky the kangaroos did all the hard work for us. We grabbed our spears and read the next page which told us to grab the soap leaves and rub them together in our hands. We don’t have a soap tree, but we do have a Lemon Myrtle tree which we got the children to pick a leaf off each and crush it into a ball. The smell instantly left the leaves, and we were all left with sweet lemon hands! We held onto our lemon myrtle leaves and brought them to our fire pit! The next page talks about cooking on the fire and using it to light our way and send a signal to our Aboriginal families. We cooked our lemon myrtle leaves in the fire and used some torches to light our way and send our signal. We were glad we read the book as it told us to watch out for the snake! We all spotted it, the children showed excitement when seeing it. Next, we had to use our spears to hunt fish! The children hurried to the fish in the sandpit. They used their hand-eye coordination to stab the fish ready to take home for dinner. Some of the children found this to be a little tricky but persisted with some positive re-enforcement from their educators. Soon everyone had a fish on their spear! Time for a water break! The Aboriginal People in the story dug for their fresh water and drank with their hands. Our group cupped our hands and had cold water poured into them for them to drink. The children were smiling as they tried to drink all the water before it ran from their hands. After drinking our cold water, we checked our book to see what was next. We had to check if it was a crab hunting season, so we looked for a full moon! We laid down in the sand pit and found the full moon! Let’s go hunting! We got our spears again and found the crabs. The children were confident this time and used the spears with all their strength, some even breaking the spears, we have some very strong hunters! We sat in the shade to read our next page, time to follow the stars in our canoes. The children grabbed their paddles, sat in our tire canoe, and started to row. Some of the children started to sing ‘row row row your boat’ so then we all sung it together as we rowed. “My boat is stuck!” One of the children said, “That means we have reached the land!” We got out of our boats and followed the stars that were placed around our playground, we used the Aboriginal symbol for the stars. The children showed a huge excitement when finding one and started to run to find the next. We then found a shooting star just like the book! We read the last page together next to the shooting star. Oh no! A storm was coming, loud thunder, wind and rain! We had to run to the cave to be safe from the storm, we ran through the ‘rain’ (water sprinkling from the hose) to our cave (under our fort) the children followed their educator through the storm and made it safely to the cave. In the cave the children were given a huge five for completing the bush track! The children did an amazing job using their imagination to the fullest and showing respect towards the Aboriginal culture and way of life.
