Glen Education Edithvale
Empowering Children Through Safety, Voice and Relationships
By Kate Kett, Early Childhood Teacher
At Glen Edithvale Kindergarten, we prioritise empowering children to understand their rights, express their needs, and recognise what safe relationships look and feel like. We empower children through intentional teaching, teaching children emotional literacy, modelling positive relationships and behaviours, and creating supportive environments.
Children are supported to understand that they have rights, such as the right to feel safe, be respected, and have their voices heard. At Glen Edithvale Kindergarten, we explore this through discussions around our rights and reading stories around fairness and respect. An example of this within our learning program is using the book ‘My Underpants Rule’ to support the children’s body awareness and anatomy, and to empower children to understand their rights around their own bodies. Through understanding body autonomy and that their body belongs to them, children can recognise safe and unsafe feelings, while practicing using their voice. We help children identify safe adults that they can talk to if they feel uncomfortable or unsafe, and we use scenarios and stories to explore concepts like boundaries, consent, and respect.
Children feel empowered when they know their thoughts and emotions matter. We empower children by using their voices in our program, encouraging them to make choices and participate in making decisions about our kindergarten and learning program. We ask the children questions and record their answers and what is important to them in our program book to help guide future learning. We teach the children about emotional literacy, through naming feelings and practicing self-regulation techniques together, and use role play to explore all feelings.
Children learn about relationships through guidance and modelling. We discuss behaviours that show kindness, respect, and trust. Through these discussions with children, we have developed three expectations for our program: ‘We are safe, we are kind, we are responsible.’ These expectations describe how everyone will behave and interact whilst at our service, and were developed in consultation with children, educators, and families. The children have helped to create posters with specific examples of how we can be safe, kind and responsible at our service, with photos of these expectations in action in our learning program. Some examples include; using our walking feet inside, sneezing into our elbows, being kind to ourselves and others, asking for help when we need it, and sharing our feeling with each other.
Establishing these program-wide expectations adds a shared focus and shared language for describing behaviour expectations to all children, educators, and families. These clear expectations help children feel safe by promoting positive behaviour.
As educators, we understand the critical role that we play in demonstrating healthy relationships. At Glen Edithvale Kindergarten, we are proud of how we demonstrate this by speaking respectfully to each other, showing empathy and fairness when resolving conflicts, and showing how to apologise, compromise, and problem solve.
