Providing Early Childhood Education in Wollongong
Early Years Learning Framework
The arrival of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) has been a long time coming. This framework is the first national document for Early Childhood Australia, recognising the critical role the early years play in shaping the foundations for life. This will see childcare in Australia move away from "babysitting." The National Framework provides a scaffold for which learning experiences and opportunities are shaped throughout the day in early childhood education centres across Australia.
Importantly, alignment with the EYLF will require preschools and day care centres to consider how we can step up to the plate and deliver high-quality experiences and interactions for and with your children. The EYLF is an exciting document and one that we feel closely aligned to.
Interactions With Children
Educators reflect and think critically about interactions with children throughout the day, and base programming decisions around these reflections. The EYLF also places emphasis on the environment as an informal space where children engage in meaningful conversations and interactions regularly. There is focus on providing natural play spaces that promote the underpinnings of early environmental awareness, and also recognition that Indigenous Australia is intrinsically linked to holistic learning in the early years.
The EYLF allows us to consider the role of the adult when working with children, and we believe that the educator has a role to play in collaborating knowledge alongside children, rather than for children. In this way, families will see educators at Grandma Rosie’s Quality Long Day Care actively engaged in the construction of knowledge, and implementing strategies for revisiting and extending children's ideas about how the world works, based on experiences and knowledge of best practice in the industry.
Shaping Children's Futures
Critically, the EYLF identifies the role that families play in shaping children's futures, and provides a space for sharing information, and building positive and respectful connections between educators and family members. Only when open, respectful interactions between family and educator occur can we begin to support the holistic development of children.
Learning from home is shared with the childcare centre in ways that promote a healthy self-esteem and self-concept, through recognising that each child is special and important. The EYLF also establishes the role of educators as providing a medium for sharing children's ideas, concerns and questions with the community. Children have powerful, important and relevant things to say, and require a medium to promote this voice actively.
Contact us today for EYLF enquiries. We operate childcare centres throughout the Woolongong region, with locations in central Wollongong, Primbee and Haywards Bay, as well as two centres in Dapto.
Play Is Learning
Play is very important for children. Play provides a context for children to explore, expand and express theories, relationships, attributes of the world (people, places, objects), communication and ways of being, belonging and becoming. Play leads to the expansion of children's repertoire of actions and provides opportunities for children to connect their thinking and actions, leading to changes in their brain architecture, i.e., learning.
Through play, babies and young children explore and learn to understand the world around them as they come to communicate, discover, imagine and create. When children play, they are showing what they have learned and what they are trying to understand.
This is why play is one of the foundations of the Early Years Learning Framework. By using this framework, the educators in our childcare centre will guide your child's play by carefully designing learning activities and stimulating indoor and outdoor learning environments. To learn more or for enrolment enquiries, get in touch with us on (02) 4226 6589.
Engaging in Intentional Teaching
Intentional teaching is deliberate, purposeful and thoughtful. At Grandma Rosie’s Quality Long Day Care, we engage in intentional teaching and recognise that learning occurs in social contexts and that interactions and conversations are vitally important for learning. We actively promote children's learning through worthwhile and challenging experiences and interactions that foster high-level thinking skills.
To extend children's thinking and learning, we aim to use strategies such as:
- Modelling & demonstrating
- Open questioning
- Speculating
- Explaining
- Engaging in shared thinking
- Problem solving
Educators move flexibly in and out of different roles and draw on different strategies as the context changes. We plan opportunities for intentional teaching and knowledge-building.
