Glen Education St John's 

Sharing Stories

Melanie van Delft, Early Childhood Teacher Priya Suraindran, Early Childhood Educator

“What is worthy of children’s time?”

At Glen St John’s Kindergarten, we chose to privilege our families through our ‘Story Sharing’ program. 

After identifying the importance of the relationship between families, children and educators and understanding the challenges faced with how best to include and incorporate families within our program we felt it important that families were welcomed to join our space anytime throughout the year and conscious not just to invite them in for ‘traditional’ celebrations. 

We appreciate, respect and celebrate every family and their culture and traditions and believed that if families felt welcomed to come and share their stories it would have everlasting benefits for our community. During the early years children learn through multiple lived experiences, the more experiences, the more interests are provoked and the richer their learning becomes.

The invitation was provided to all families to come in and share their story - whether it be to demonstrate something from their culture (cooking, art, music, dance), sharing a family tradition, giving insight into their occupation to enhance children’s knowledge and learning about particular topics or simply to read a story, sing a song and just be present within our space.

We have been delighted with the rich and varied story sharing that has occurred this year including having one Mum provide us with an insight into her occupation as a psychologist (as she describes it helping people feel good and find answers to their questions) and was generous enough to lead us in a meditation session as part of our daily quiet time routine. The children were captivated when one father arrived with the biggest map of the world displaying colourful pins and some treasures from their holidays. He enlightened us that each time their family travels they put a coloured pin (different colour for each family member) in the country they traveled to making a visual representation of where they have been. A fantastic family tradition which was well received by all.

To enrich our program further we had a visit from two police officers and their police car! One of the children’s father showed us the lights and sirens and important equipment including handcuffs, badges, radios and even the finger-printing equipment. An important takeaway from this presentation was knowing uniformed police officers are safe adults and can be a good choice to ask for help in our community!

As outlined in National Quality Area 6 - Collaborative partnerships with families are fundamental to achieving quality outcomes for children, we believe our Story Sharing program has been instrumental in allowing families to share their stories with our community and provided rich learning opportunities for our children. They have also allowed children to develop a sense of belonging to their family and community by connecting and contributing to their world (EYLF Outcome 2).

It’s certainly a part of our program that we believe was ‘worthy of children’s time’ and will hopefully be reflected in years to come!