Hearts and Minds Early Learning McKellar

Hearts and Minds Early Learning McKellar believes early childhood education should be intentionally diverse, inclusive, and layered. The learning experiences implemented in our environments cover all critical subject areas and learning dispositions such as creative and performing arts, indigenous perspective, community and culture, wellbeing, STEM learning, literacy and language, numeracy, sustainability, fundamental movement and skills. We teach the whole Rainbow! The Rainbow is an internationally recognised symbol of inclusion, connectedness, love and hope and is used as a guide for the nature of our planning practice.

To ensure that all our routines and daily programme cater to all children, we have an Educational Leader finishing her ECT degree and is passionate about new ways of teaching. She is available to all educators for support and advice. She also conducts individual mentoring sessions with staff to ensure we allow them to be heard and ask questions. To support interactions with peers, we provide group experiences within the rooms. We family group similar age groups in the mornings and afternoons. We also have two playgrounds for younger and older children. Our educators use strategies like collaborating, encouraging, identifying, listening, modelling, and providing for choice. To build on children's strengths, we design our curriculum to support their interests, scaffold their learning, and gain family input. We set up a learning environment based on each child's strengths. To encourage children's engagement, we critically reflect every week on our pedagogy and curriculum, and if any barriers are identified, we modify them. We provide various training to our educators, like behaviour management, inclusion support, interactions with children, etc.