By Julie Madgwick, Head of Early Learning & Education.

With a new year around the corner, your child might be heading off for their first day of school in just a few short months. And after a tumultuous year full of change for many families, we have some good news.

If you’re thinking about enrolling your child in one of our education and care centres for the last few months of 2020, it’s not too late. In fact, it’s never too late for your child to receive the benefits of attending a kindergarten or preschool before they begin their journey into primary school.

This important year provides ongoing learning through which children make sense of their world as they actively engage with their peers within specifically designed learning environments.

The benefits of attending kindergarten or preschool

Attending our high-quality, government-approved kindergarten or preschool program will provide opportunities for your child to:

1. Grow in confidence, developing a positive view of themselves as a learner
2. Use language effectively to communicate ideas, feelings and needs
3. Gain experience in a group learning environment alongside their peers
4. Make friends and engage in group activities where they cooperate with their friends
5. Build positive relationships with their educators along with their new friends
6. Learn to look after their belongings
7. Develop resilience and self-regulation through engaging in activities that challenge them
8. Confidently communicate with adults outside of their family
9. Develop literacy skills, creatively expressing ideas and feelings through art, music, story-telling and dramatic play
10. Develop scientific and numeracy skills as they identify, explore, examine and questions to solve problems.

Building relationships

Our educators and teachers are children’s learning partners and have a unique opportunity to positively influence their futures. Developed and led by bachelor degree-qualified and registered early childhood teachers, our programs support children to the develop skills and dispositions to experience success as a learner in the kindergarten/preschool year and beyond.

Guided by the principles, practices and outcomes of the Early Years Learning Framework, our purposeful and engaging programs build on children’s interests and learning in literacy, numeracy, the arts and STEM.

As children progress on their learning journey, we offer increasingly complex experiences to develop dispositions for life-long learning. Planning from children’s interests, we work alongside them as they challenge themselves to take risks in their learning; be creative and curious problem-solvers; develop resilience as they persist with new challenges; and have confidence to develop positive and lasting relationships with their peers.

Important learning and development

In the final year before school, this includes:

• Oral language, as this is the basis for all literacy learning. Children are supported to communicate with each other, with new vocabulary introduced as part of everyday conversations, modeling correct grammar and sentence structures, singing, playing games, and reading to children daily.
• Social-emotional skills, including the ability to self-regulate one’s emotions.
• Physical skills, developed through an active learning program.
• Brain development, building the connectors for all later learning through active engagement, alongside their peers, in a play-based program.

Research shows children are more likely to learn when they are engaged in an activity. A play-based program encourages active engagement in learning and supports a range of positive developmental outcomes including resilience and independence, curiosity and creativity.

To learn more about our kindergarten and preschool program, click here.