Longreach Childcare Services Philosophy
Children
At our Centre we believe that children are creative, strong and capable individuals. Every child has their own learning styles, ways of communicating and different family backgrounds. We acknowledge this and incorporate these aspects of the child into our daily program. We believe that positive interactions and partnerships with not only the individual child but also their families have significant impact on that child’s learning and their social and emotional wellbeing. We embrace diversity and inclusion and attempt to make every effort for all children to feel welcome and included at our Centre.
Families
Families are a child’s first and most influential people in their life. We believe that building positive and open relationships with individual families creates a more successful learning environment for their child/children. As a Centre we respect and incorporate individual family’s cultures, values and beliefs into our curriculum and welcome diversity with open arms. We also encourage all families to have input into our curriculum, the day to day aspects of our services and take all feedback as constructive.
Program and Curriculum
We use the Early Years Learning Framework, Queensland Kindergarten Guidelines and My Time Our Place, depending on the room age group, to guide our program. Our program is flexible and based off the children’s individual interests, culture, needs, abilities and parent input. We encourage children to have input into their rooms programs to develop the child’s sense of agency. Throughout the Centre we aim to inform our parents and families about our program and their child’s journey of learning through meaningful room displays and the easily accessible OWNA App.
Sustainability and Environment
As we live in a very remote area with dry and hot conditions, we try to encourage, educator, model and inform the children of many other ways that we can care for our environment. As there is limited recycling in our community, we encourage children to reduce waste and use recycled material for play and craft, families are encouraged to donate recyclable materials to the Centre and we aim to provide natural and open ended recyclable resources for the children to engage with. We also get the children involved in looking after our plants here at our Centre, whether that is planting new ones or watering the already existing ones. Sustainability and our environment is something we encourage everyday and are constantly trying to find better ways for improvement.
Community
Our Centre is based in a small community so we really value partnerships with our local community. We often have community members from Council, the Police, Fire Brigade and Ambulance services join us in celebration of different events held at our Centre throughout the year. Our Kindergarten program also runs partnership meetings with our local schools in order to ease the transition to school for the children once they have graduated from Kindergarten. We also like to return the support we are given from the community back though purchases through local businesses and attending community events. As a Centre we are always willing to create new partnerships with our local community members and we are open to members approaching us.
Colleagues
We know and believe that a child care centre cannot happen effectively without a team that works together. We are a team that takes pride in our respectful relationships, communication and fairness. We believe that every educator has different knowledge and experience that they are willing to share with each other to help improve others knowledge and understandings. We constantly use and reflect on the Early Childhood Australia; ‘Code of Ethics’ and our own Management Directives to guide us.
