BRIBIE ISLAND
Community Kindergarten
Providing children with a Natural Childhood, and gathering precious memories along the way
Our Bush Kindy
Research shows that play-based learning and spending time in nature are beneficial to children's health and mental well-being. Our children love to revisit familiar places and challenge themselves to climb a little higher or add to the cubby they built last visit. In keeping with environmental respect, we only collect or work with things already on the ground, such as sticks, branches, and leaves. The children develop a respect and affinity for the environment as they listen to local bird cries or look for lizards and bugs. In the bush setting, they have endless opportunities to develop their coordination as they balance on uneven ground, logs, slack lines, and rocks. Richard Louv beautifully sums it up in his book "Last Child in the Woods" where he says, "The woods are my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses."
For more information check our Bush Kindy Brochure.
Our Aged Care Program
We conduct weekly visits to the Bribie Island Aged Care Facility on Foley Street, which is within walking distance from the kindergarten. These visits occur every Friday during term.
While Friday is a Dolphin day, we encourage Turtle children and a carer to join us as well. We limit the group to 11 Dolphins each week, ensuring each child has the opportunity to visit twice a month. The children who don't come stay at the kindergarten with other team members. These visits offer significant benefits to both the children and the residents.
One reason these visits are important for our community is that many families are dispersed across the country and even the globe. Many older residents at the Bribie Island Aged Care Service often don't have grandchildren or great-grandchildren living nearby, or may not have any family at all. Additionally, some of our kindergarten children may not have grandparents living close by. This makes these intergenerational visits valuable for both generations.
Recognizing the importance of family and community, and valuing the wisdom and experience of our older generation, these visits offer invaluable experiences for our children. They benefit from learning from and interacting with mature and experienced role models. Additionally, the children thrive in a nurturing environment where they can contribute to the well-being of others, helping the elderly feel less isolated. Both children and residents enjoy the fun and camaraderie of shared activities.
We engage in group reading, performing for the residents, art and craft projects, puzzles, games, music therapy, building with small manipulatives, and most importantly, the rich and meaningful conversations that arise from bringing together young and old.
Bribie Island Community Kindergarten and Bribie Island Aged Care are firmly committed to this innovative program and we look forward to strengthening intergenerational relationships now and into the future.
Documenting Your Child's Learning
When we pause to ask children's thoughts, we unlock a world of wonder. They are not only eager learners but also insightful thinkers, often surprising us with their knowledge and creativity.
At Bribie Island Community Kindergarten, our qualified teachers strive to make your child's learning visible by capturing their journey in portfolios. Portfolios are more than just a memory or keepsake of your child's time at Bribie Island Community Kindergarten. The portfolios provide insight into your child's learning and tell the story of their time at kindergarten. They also provide children with opportunities to revisit and reflect on past experiences, and a record of their learning. Additionally, they provide our teachers with the knowledge they need to ensure your child's time with us is full of wonder and possibility.
Through careful observation and documentation, teachers gather information to determine the appropriate level of challenge to offer your child, further enhancing their skills, abilities, and comprehension. Observation and documentation form the foundation for planning additional experiences and arranging the environment to extend learning. As our understanding of your child grows through observation, teachers can plan interactions that best support your child's interests, needs, ideas, and questions. The use of documentation methods, such as individual child portfolios via Storypark, learning stories, images, child voice-overs, and project learning journals, allows teachers to gain an in-depth understanding of your child's development in action.
Photos and work samples provide a unique opportunity for focused discussions between you and the teachers. This fosters deeper partnerships and enables shared goal setting.
Our Curriculum
Our approach to curriculum is rooted in a long-standing tradition of early childhood philosophy and practice, supported by contemporary international and national research and theoretical perspectives on children's learning, health, and well-being. In our service, children are valued and respected as competent and capable co-contributors to the learning process. Our teachers work alongside your child to actively encourage and support their learning journey.
Our team regularly engages in professional development to ensure our curriculum is informed by the latest research.
The curriculum we offer is a collaborative venture, with children and developed by fully qualified early childhood professionals. Our physical environments and overall atmosphere are designed to support and enhance your child's learning. Your child's curiosity, enthusiasm, and love of learning will be continually encouraged by our staff. As teachers and children engage in inquiry together, children learn to observe, ask questions, reflect on their actions, and engage in meaningful, self-directed activities.
Our well-respected tradition of encouraging family and community involvement ensures that our curriculum:
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Supports and affirms parents in their role
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Acknowledges the individuality of family aspirations and traditions
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Optimizes learning for children
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Engages parents in cooperative decision-making
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Is relevant to the children, families, and community
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Facilitates networking among families within the local community
The essence of our role as educators is to add complexity to children's thinking by posing questions such as "What do you think?" or "I wonder... if, what, how, why, when?" By doing so, adults provide children with possibilities, acknowledge them as thinkers and constructors of knowledge, and simultaneously indicate their readiness to listen.
Learning Through Play
Much of the debate in early childhood education focuses on how educators should be teaching our children. Just as a baby crawls before walking, children must naturally progress through their unique stages of learning. A curriculum that features child-initiated experiences ensures young minds continue to develop.
To nurture and develop future generations of thinkers, play is an essential component of a quality early childhood education. Research has shown that play is the best exercise for the brain, providing the perfect stimulus for brain development.
The Canadian Government's Early Years Study (McCain & Mustard, 1999) concluded: "Play-based problem-solving with other children and an adult is an early learning strategy that has a crucial effect on early brain development and should be the format for children entering the school system."
Play that encourages problem-solving offers children a multitude of opportunities to explore, discover, and create. Play fosters qualities like curiosity, perseverance, and risk-taking, which are believed to motivate lifelong learning. These qualities are often best developed through self-discovery at a young age.
If we remove play from children's lives, we limit their potential for learning.
Learning Through Art
The visual arts are an essential part of children's educational experiences and an integral component of our kindergarten curriculum. Offering a strong visual arts program for young children stems from our understanding of the child's innate desire and will to make sense of their world. Drawing, painting, collage, clay work, and construction are some of the most effective ways children can construct and convey their understanding of the world around them.
We are fortunate to have a wonderful volunteer, Nanna Sue, run a guided drawing program with the children.
Nature
Here at our Community Kindergarten, we focus on the natural environment around us and make every effort to teach children the importance of nature conservation.
Bribie Island Community Kindergarten actively promotes environmental awareness and encourages children and families to protect the environment through modeling and education. We run a bush kindy program where we take children into the bushland behind our kindy to explore and learn about our native flora and fauna. We strive to cultivate a lifelong respect for environmental awareness and care, fostering future stewards of the land.
Native wildlife is treated with care and respect, allowed to remain free while providing opportunities for children to observe and learn. Planting and tending to trees and shrubs is a valued aspect of our service, providing natural shade and maintaining habitats for birds and other native wildlife. Where possible, hygienic composting of lawn clippings and fruit waste is practiced, along with recycling of plastic, paper, metal, and glass materials.
Our kindy children have shown a keen interest in animals. Since 2018, 'Diamond,' our beautiful barking gecko, joined the family. In 2022, we welcomed our own resident turtle. The addition of reptiles has enhanced our educational opportunities to teach children the importance of caring for our environment and native animals. These reptiles have joined our animal family, which includes a rehabilitated possum released back into the wild (residing in a possum box on kindy land), and a native beehive.
Bribie Island Community Kindergarten has a policy on "minimizing harsh elements in early childhood settings," encouraging hygiene practices without the use of harmful chemicals. In keeping with teaching and learning around sustainable practices, we have rainwater tanks, solar electricity and heating panels, a worm farm, compost, insect houses, and we encourage litterless lunches.
Embedding Culture
Incorporating relevant, culturally-based experiences and celebrations in children's programs presents many different learning opportunities, including:
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Fostering a sense of belonging and inclusion for every child, family, team, and community member
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Increasing children's understanding of and respect for diversity and differences
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Raising children's self-awareness and confidence
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Providing for children's holistic development: mind, body, and spirit
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Supporting a positive cultural identity for every child and family
Culture is what people have developed together, what they share, and how they live together. It is the ideas, values, rules, norms, codes, and symbols that a human being inherits from the previous generation and strives to pass on to the next, often with modifications and additions.
The Joondoburri People of the Gubbi Gubbi Nation are the First People who lived on and cared for this amazing space where we all are privileged to learn, work, and play.
To learn more about the Action Research conducted by Bribie Kindy, Uncle Ron, Warwick Outram, our children, and families in 2015 and 2016, please click here. This research led to the introduction of our Bush and Beach Kindy and Family Bush and Beach Walks.
Please click here to read a wonderful poem - OUR COUNTRY, OUR PLACE by April Cunningham.
