Blog

Wow, thank you so much!

9/7/2019

It was such an honour to be presented with two awards at the ECE Managers and Owners Summit 2019 recently!

Thank you so much to ChildForum Early Childhood National Organisation, NZ Childcare Finance and My ECE for both the awards, and such a fantastic day at the event!

Providing the highest quality childcare is our passion and absolute pleasure, and we appreciate so deeply being recognised for this!💛💚

Super special siblings!

8/7/2019

We love getting to know the families of our little bees - and in some cases, we're even lucky enough to have siblings attending preschool together! 🐝

We love seeing our bigger bees take care of their younger siblings here at Honeybees! 💗

Have a safe and happy Easter everyone!

18/4/2019

2019 so far .... we're loving it!

15/4/2019

We're so pleased to keep receiving such beautiful feedback from our Honeybees family - we love you all too, guys!

https://www.myece.org.nz/find-ece/4672-honey-bees

These little bees make all of our days so special and we feel very blessed to spend our time with them. Here are some snaps of our adventures over the past few months!

Mental Health Awareness Week

27/11/2018

In October it was Mental Health Awareness Week in New Zealand and this year’s theme was ‘Let nature in, strengthen your wellbeing’.
🌳🐝
The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand suggest introducing five simple strategies into our everyday lives. Regardless of how much or little you interact with nature in your daily life, you can make the 'Five Ways to Wellbeing' work for you and your families!

Yoga and meditation are amazing ways to help children and adults of all ages relax, focus and breathe deeply and think mindfully. We often run children’s yoga classes, and we spend time practicing simple meditation using principles and activities from the book ‘A Handful of Quiet’. 'A Handful of Quiet' presents one of the best known and most innovative meditation practices developed for practice with children.
🧘‍♀️🙏
During Mental Health Awareness Week we also placed a big emphasis on the importance of kindness and how it positively affects others. The children brainstormed ideas of things they thought represented kindness and five children were awarded Kindness Certificates last week for demonstrating especially kind behaviour towards their peers and teachers!

We all felt the kind vibes and are so grateful to have so many lovely, kind children here with us at Honeybees!
💚💛🧡

Shoebox Christmas

26/11/2018

🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄

This year Honeybees is taking part in Auckland's 'Shoebox Christmas'.

*What on earth is a Shoebox Christmas you ask?*

Shoebox Christmas is an amazing organisation and team of volunteers who deliver Christmas presents (kindly donated by lovely people like us and you!), wrapped in a shoebox, to kids who could do with an extra smile on Christmas Day. They do this by working alongside low decile schools and preschools, Women's Refuge, and community organisations.

This year Honeybees Preschool has been allocated four year old Tania, and two year old Eric. We can't wait to make their Christmas Day really special. We hope to fill their shoeboxes at Honeybees with awesome little gifts, and welcome our families to pop something small in if they feel like it!

It's almost Christmas Time everyone 🤗💕🙌

Check out the festivities, love and excitement shared during Shoebox Christmas last year!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCJ_85ONxCI&feature=player_embedded

Halloween 2018 @ Honeybees!

7/11/2018

Some snaps from Halloween last week! Always such a fun day!
🦄 🐰 🦖 🦋 🎃

A special visit from a beekeeper!

19/10/2018

Last Friday we had a very special visit from a beekeeper!

Jessie from BEES UP TOP visited Honeybees to introduce the children to the wide world of pollination, honey and beekeeping - and to remind us all just how incredibly important our busy, buzzy little friends are!

Thank you so much for your time, Jessie (and for the delicious Bethells Valley Honey!) - we are so grateful for the work you are doing to rescue and re-home swarms of bees in Auckland City. You're showing that a few people can make a very big difference, and we are so excited to be supporting your efforts!

🐝🍇🐝🍉🐝🍋🐝🥦🐝
🐝🍐🐝🍑🐝🥝🐝🍓🐝
🐝🍅🐝🥑🐝🥕🐝🌶️🐝

Mental Health Awareness Week

16/10/2018

In October it was Mental Health Awareness Week in New Zealand and this year’s theme was ‘Let nature in, strengthen your wellbeing’ 🌳🐝

The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand suggest introducing five simple strategies into our everyday lives. Regardless of how much or little you interact with nature in your daily life, you can make the 'Five Ways to Wellbeing' work for you and your families!

Yoga and meditation are amazing ways to help children and adults of all ages relax, focus and breathe deeply and think mindfully. We often run children’s yoga classes, and we spend time practicing simple meditation using principles and activities from the book ‘A Handful of Quiet’. 'A Handful of Quiet' presents one of the best known and most innovative meditation practices developed for practice with children 🙏

During Mental Health Awareness Week we also placed a big emphasis on the importance of kindness and how it positively affects others. The children brainstormed ideas of things they thought represented kindness and five children were awarded Kindness Certificates last week for demonstrating especially kind behaviour towards their peers and teachers!

We all felt the kind vibes and are so grateful to have so many lovely, kind children here with us at Honeybees!

💚💛🧡

BEES UP TOP!

2/10/2018

Honeybees Preschool recently reached out to our new friends at BEES UP TOP who are doing INCREDIBLE things right now! Jess and Luke are a young dynamic duo based out at Bethells Beach in West Auckland who are determined to save the bees!

🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

"We have been urban beekeepers for five years. In 2016 we travelled the world learning about bees from beekeepers all over the world. We visited as many countries as we could get our sticky, honey covered hands on learning about the prevention of disease, crop pollination and honey extraction.
We aim to increase New Zealand’s bee population by supplying healthy, happy hives to urban areas and to educate our future generation on the importance of keeping our little workers around."

🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Bees Up Top rescue swarms for free before the exterminator is called in, they run Beginners Beekeeping Courses, and they build hives which they will install and maintain on your property - and then at the end of the season, deliver your honey to you!

They are running a PledgeMe campaign at the moment, as their aim is to rescue and re-home 100 bee colonies starting this Spring. The hives that the rescue bees go into are expensive and so is their medicine however, so they need our help to raise funds. A small pledge will allow them to increase the healthy beehive population in New Zealand! For pledges of $30+ you'll even get a jar of Bethells Valley honey with a slice of honeycomb inside!

🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Honeybees Preschool just love what Jessie and Luke are doing and are very proud to support their project. Jess is popping in soon to have a chat with our little ones about our even littler friends out there keeping our world buzzing!

If you have a moment, please check out their PledgeMe campaign and donate - every dollar helps!

https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/5779-rescue-rehome-bees
https://www.beesuptop.co.nz/our-roots/

We love dress-ups!

19/7/2018

Matariki @ Honeybees!

28/6/2018

A couple of weeks ago, on June 15th, Matariki began! Matariki signals the Māori New Year. It is a time of celebration in New Zealand that begins with the rising of the Matariki star cluster ⭐🌠🌟

Festivities to celebrate Matariki traditionally followed the harvesting of crops when the food storehouses were full, freeing up time for family activites! 🥕😁

Here at Honeybees we love celebrating Matariki. This year the children created sparkly ‘galaxy’ play dough, and focused on artwork encompassing beautiful night sky stars!

As a special treat the children worked as a team to help our chef create a delicious root vegetable soup 👨‍🍳 We even had home-baked bread! 🥣🍞What a feast!

World Environment Day @ Honeybees

6/6/2018

Yesterday we had a special focus in our Group Time sessions on our beautiful blue and green planet.

The children and teachers had some inspiring conversation about how we can best love and care for this place we are lucky to call home...while getting our creative hands messy, of course!

🌿💙🌏✅💦♻️

Lest we forget...

27/4/2018

The children have enjoyed learning a little about ANZAC Day this month, and this week they made some poppies of their own.

The red poppy has become a symbol of war remembrance all over the world.

Upon returning to preschool on Thursday this week, the children had noticed a lot of people wearing poppies on Wednesday!