Glen Education Brady Road 

Sustainability - An Evolving Project

By Helen Tselios Early Childhood Teacher and Vernessa Johnstone, Early Childhood Educator 

At Glen Brady Road Kindergarten, we are working towards a more sustainable future. The children have been busy tending to our very own herb and vegetable garden, learning where food comes from and how to care for the environment. There’s nothing quite like seeing the joy on their faces as children pick fresh herbs and vegetables they’ve helped to grow. This aligns to Learning Outcome 2 for Sustainability: Children develop an understanding of their impact on the environment and the importance of caring for the world around them. Through hands-on experiences such as composting with the worm farm, participating in recycling initiatives, and tending the garden, children learn sustainable practices and recognise how their actions contribute to a healthier planet.

Children become environmentally responsible, showing respect for living things and resources, and are empowered to make choices that support a cleaner, greener future. 

The children this term have been busy digging and looking for insects at the kindergarten’s back yard. The children were absolutely fascinated by the discovery of a very long worm which we measured at 18cm, the children eagerly observing the worm and learning about its role in the ecosystem. With this becoming our inquiry project we created a bug station inside our kindergarten room in a glass tank where the curiosity, with the children sharing their findings and taking turns caring for their new garden friend. This experience has sparked even more interest in nature and sustainability within our kindergarten community. We have a very own Worm Farm many of the children have been showing great interest in where their food scraps go and how we end up getting magnificent worm wee for our plants and gardens. Educators have initiated this by freezing food scraps from home too to allow the children across the week to witness firsthand the experience of caring for our worm farm.  We have noticed a growing interest as children often eagerly lead their families to show them the worm farm. We read the story Super worm to the children and made our own Super worm from stocking tissue paper so the children can have a more hands-on experience, also a threading experience with yoghurt lids to replicate our Super worm. Not forgetting our lovely stick insects which have both grown, there again children request to hold and feed, spray them daily and with the use of magnifying glasses children sit with great concentration observing the stick insects watching them munching on gum leaves.

Children have shown interest in caring for the stick insects over the holidays and bringing in their own gum leaves that they’ve found at the park this makes me happy as I can see a growing appreciation and sense of care for our environment through the children’s actions and ownership.  

Recycle Hub 

The Recycle Hub is our newest project happening.  We have created a Recycle Rescue space where our lockers used to be, which provides a great opportunity for our community to contribute and share our recycling resources as the children use their creativity to make masterpieces through art and craft. 

Baskets, Moccona coffee glass jars, metal tin cans, tree stumps, were sourced and are rapidly filling with useful materials to create a natural and sustainable practice. Each time we take a walk on country the children are encouraged to look around them taking in the natural beauty and source items for our service, children enjoyed filling baskets when visiting the local parkland, collecting colourful leaves, sticks, rocks, stones, acorns, pods, pinecones, gumnuts, feathers, flowers, broadening their interest and love of learning and nature. children enjoyed decorating their own tin can filling it with soil and a plant for our special persons week, they were fabulous creations. 

Families can continually contribute to our project by donating newspapers, tins, bottle caps, corks, buttons, wooden pieces, cardboard boxes, etc. We have particular children very interested in recycling and has a great interest in garbage trucks as they have extensive knowledge of recycling as well as our ongoing support from our community donations to Diabetes Australia which displays a convenient drop off area we have two white bins allocated out the front of kinder families are encouraged to drop of any unused, unwanted items clothing toys, books, etc and these are collected every fortnight. 

Rainbow Connections 

We have built a beautiful growing space inside the kindergarten room.  It was often observed that children love to paint rainbows not just painting them but this filters across many colourful mediums through their levels of  stampings, pencil, pastel, crayon, water colour drawings, we decided to create a rainbow wall surrounded by all the different types of material used in their art work, around our room again alining with a sustainable practice we created beautiful watercolours jars from recycled spaghetti pasta sauce jars, Vegemite jars to capture the amazing rainbow effect on a sunny day it’s spectacular. A very simple but effective idea. As an addition to this we are encouraging the children to use a sensory squeeze ball during a relaxation time these are made by some children colourful but again highly effective and encouraged practice by incorporating Auslan language learning the colours of the rainbow, our Mandarin teachers have also used the colour monster story in their teaching too.   

Getting families and the community involved

We have terrific volunteers who endlessly contribute to our working bee each month rolling up their sleeves and helping us maintain a safe workable environment for our children. Developing new friendships as they complete tasks around our kindergarten. This has encouraged groups of kinder families to go away on camping trips together the children have comeback excited sharing their camping adventures. Again, this ties in with our shared camping experience created inside the kindergarten classroom and hopefully soon incorporating fire safety experiences.