Curious Cubs Learning

☕ Why is our holiday pop-up stay and play?

During our regular sessions, families can choose between staying and playing or dropping off. For our holiday pop-ups, though, we have intentionally chosen stay and play only—because these days have a different purpose.

Our pop-ups are about community. They give children a chance to connect with other learners while their usual activities may be paused—and give parents the opportunity to connect too.

They’re also a relaxed way for new families to experience what Curious Cubs is all about, meet me, chat with other parents and ask any questions they may have.

Staying doesn’t mean you need to follow your child around all day. Have a cuppa, bring your laptop or settle in for a chat—whatever works for you and your child.

Throughout the day, there will be a balance of:

🌿 Child-led exploration of the environment and learning invitations
✨ Optional moments when I invite learners to come together for a shared activity
💬 Opportunities for connection between children, parents and me

We absolutely value drop-and-go learning, and it remains part of our regular Curious Cubs sessions. Our holiday pop-ups simply have a different purpose: creating space for our whole Curious Cubs community to connect, explore and belong.

✨ Reading comprehension is more than answering questions at the end of a passage. ✨

Comprehension happens when many skills work together: reading words accurately and automatically, understanding vocabulary, drawing on background knowledge, following sentence structure, recognising how a text is organised and thinking beyond the literal words to infer, question, summarise and connect ideas. Scarborough’s Reading Rope helps us visualise this, with word recognition and language comprehension gradually becoming more connected and increasingly skilled.

This is why comprehension cannot be taught through strategies alone.

A child can learn to “make a prediction” or “find the main idea”, but if reading the words takes all their effort—or the vocabulary, concepts and sentence structures are unfamiliar—understanding can still fall apart. Strategies matter, but they are only one part of a much bigger, interconnected process.

At Curious Cubs Learning, comprehension develops through:

📚 explicit phonics and fluent reading practice
💬 rich conversations before, during and after stories
🌱 exploring new vocabulary, ideas and knowledge
🧩 noticing how sentences and different texts work
🎭 retelling, role play, drawing, building and creating
🔎 thinking about what is said—and what the author leaves us to work out

Sometimes comprehension looks like a thoughtful conversation around a book. Sometimes it looks like puppets, movement, drawing or building a story world.

And sometimes it does mean writing the answers down.

The goal is not simply to complete a worksheet. It is to help children become readers who can understand, think, imagine and learn from what they read. 💛

✏️ This is handwriting.

It just doesn’t look like handwriting yet. 🌸

Building a little flower garden with pool noodles, golf tees and pom poms is doing a whole lot of work behind the scenes.

Pushing the golf tees into the pool noodle builds hand and finger strength and requires children to control how much pressure they use.

Picking up and pinching the pom poms works those small finger muscles and encourages the thumb-and-finger movements they’ll later need for an efficient pencil grip.

Add tweezers and you’re increasing the challenge again — developing precision, coordination and control.

And because play gives us plenty of room to extend an idea, you can also:
🌼 sort the flowers by colour
🌼 copy or create a pattern
🌼 count how many you've planted
🌼 make repeating sequences
🌼 follow simple instructions like “red, blue, red, blue…”

We sometimes think handwriting practice needs to mean sitting at a table tracing letters.

But before children can control a pencil well, their hands need lots of opportunities to push, pinch, pull, squeeze, poke, pick up and manipulate things.

So yes… this little flower garden?

This is handwriting practice too. ✏️🌱

🌿 WHAT IS A CURIOUS CUBS POP-UP? 🌿

It’s a playful, flexible learning day—somewhere between a class and a family play session.

At Wild & Wonderful, learning invitations will be available throughout the day. There are no formal rotations and no expectation that every child will move through the activities in the same way.

Children can explore them all, return to a favourite or spend as long as they like with the experience that has captured their curiosity.

There will also be optional shared moments with stories, songs, movement and bubbles—but the day isn’t dependent on arriving at a particular time. Come when it suits your family, stay for the whole day or simply pop in for a few hours.

Grown-ups stay and play, with tea and coffee available. Bring along a picnic lunch and settle in for a wonderfully curious day together.

🌿 WILD & WONDERFUL
📅 Monday 5 October
⏰ 10am–2pm
📍 First Friends Playgroup, Swan View
🐾 Designed for ages 4–10
👶 Siblings aged 3 and under attend free
🎟️ $50 first learner | $40 additional siblings aged 4+

Bookings are now open through the link in our bio.

Sometimes the best thing we can do for children is… do a little less. 🌿

Not because we aren’t watching.
Not because we don’t care if they struggle.
But because wobbling, testing, adjusting and trying again are part of how children learn what they’re capable of.

When we resist the urge to immediately lift them up, fix the problem, give the answer or show them the “right” way, we give them something really valuable:

✨ time to think
✨ space to problem-solve
✨ opportunities to assess risk
✨ the chance to experience “I did it!”
✨ confidence that comes from knowing they worked it out

Of course, stepping back doesn’t mean stepping away. We’re still there — close enough to support when they genuinely need us, while trusting them with the bits they can manage themselves.

Sometimes that might look like watching them navigate a rocky creek bed.

Sometimes it’s waiting while they wrestle with a tricky puzzle.

Sometimes it’s biting your tongue when you can already see exactly how to fix the Lego creation. 😂

A little struggle, in a safe and supported space, isn’t a failure of learning.

It’s often where the learning is. 💛🌱

Learning often begins long before a child reads the word, solves the problem or puts pencil to paper.
It begins with feeling safe enough to try. 💛
At Curious Cubs Learning, we know confidence and academic risk-taking grow through connection — and connection looks different for every learner.
Sometimes building trust looks like:
✨ planning a writing task around p*e and poo jokes
✨ having a pillow fight when mistakes start to feel heavy
✨ pausing for a K-pop dance break
✨ sitting quietly together while beading, drawing or painting
✨ letting a child watch before they are ready to join in
These moments are not separate from the learning.
They help us understand what makes a learner laugh, what helps them regulate, how they communicate and what they need when something feels difficult.
We take time to know the child behind the skills.
Then we can gently stretch the learning without asking them to leave their sense of safety behind.
Because children are more willing to attempt an unfamiliar word, share an idea or persist through frustration when they know they will be supported — not judged — if it does not work the first time.
And gradually, the language begins to change.
From:
“I can’t do this.”
To:
“Wait… I did it!”
And sometimes:
“I can read it — you don’t need to tell me!” ✨
Those moments are never only about the word they just read.
They are about a learner beginning to see themselves as capable.

In Story Sprouts, we dive deeply into two quality texts each term. 🌱📚

Over four weeks, we read and reread each story, explore its characters and features, build vocabulary, sequence events and learn to retell it confidently in our own words.

During our Gruffalo unit, we focused closely on character—describing each character’s appearance, attributes and personality. We also experimented with different art materials as the children slowly built their wonderfully detailed, mixed-media Gruffalo scenes.

To finish the unit, we innovated the original story and created something entirely our own!

Using toys and collaborative story mapping, the children developed an Australian bush adventure starring Choc Chip the platypus, their bestie Cotton Candy the chicken…and the terrifying Gruffy!

Together, we mapped the setting, characters and sequence of events until we had a complete new story the children could confidently tell aloud—and choose to write at home if they wished.

Oral storytelling builds the vocabulary, structure and confidence children need before writing. When it is supported by play, art, movement and plenty of imagination, the learning becomes meaningful and memorable.

What a dynamic and engaging unit this turned out to be! 💚

Next week, we begin three weeks of exploring We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

And after that? I wonder which stories we’ll venture into during Term 4… 👀