Glen Education Rowen St
Our achievements for our first year with Glen Education
By The Glen Education Rowen Street Kindergarten Education Team
A big thank you to the incredible teaching team at Glen Education Rowen Street Kindergarten for all your dedication this year. The teaching team is passionate about what they do and we pride ourselves on being committed to providing high quality education for all children and thrive on watching children grow through the year. We are proud to be sending our children on to the next chapter of their learning journeys. Thank you to our families and Glen Education community for your support and for all the amazing efforts of our parent volunteer group for their ongoing fundraising efforts which has meant we have been able to include all the amazing extracurricular activities throughout the year. Our Annual Fun Day was much enjoyed by the community.
We have achieved so much this year in our first year as Glen Education and in linking these achievements back to our core values and curriculum goals we made this year we would like to share some of our main highlights.
We are proud to create welcoming learning environments that foster children’s sense of belonging, where they can be themselves and feel safe, secure and supported. As children grow in confidence to explore and learn their unique identities and confidence are also built when they are offered genuine choices, time and opportunity to exercise agency, act on their own to increase autonomy, resilience and persistence, as well as interact with others with care, empathy and respect.
Through the Pyramid Model training as part of the school readiness funding, we have been helping foster children’s social emotional literacy development through the use of visuals, making classroom agreements, discussions on fair and unfair behaviour and the importance of looking out for one another keeping each other safe, being kind to one another and treating each other and the environment with respect. These skills empower children to respect and care for themselves, others and their environment, by being an active member of the kindergarten community and wider world.
We have actively engaged and involved children in their learning by bringing in additional specialist programs who provide an opportunity for an expert in their chosen field of expertise to immerse themselves in the curriculum. These experts add a specialised level of knowledge which improve the quality, value and education of the children in an ongoing capacity.
This year we were able to have Di our Gardner in residence, Nicole our artist in residence, Yo from Playball and Neredah from Yoga-a-gogo. We have had visits from Little Wombats, Responsible pet ownership, Wild Action and are looking forward to visiting Chesterfield farm at the end of term. We are also looking forward to having a visit from Luigi Zucchini to perform a magic show for our last day of term.
We have had a focus on sustainability through our Gardner in residence program. Di has provided children an engaging and immersive program that has focused on the fundamentals of what sustainability looks like and has been supporting children to contribute to a sustainable world, through a deeper understanding of environmental, social and economic factors. We have planted many new plants in the garden to care for and appreciate and we are making ongoing project plans to enhance the front garden space.
Teachers have visited Resource Rescue, a community recycling organisation to obtain loose parts and craft materials for the children to encourage the re-use of materials that would otherwise have been thrown away, reducing the demand for new raw materials as well as reducing the environmental impact of waste going into landfill.
Throughout the year we have imbedded teaching children about our indigenous history and introducing them to our nation’s first peoples in culturally responsive ways to ensure a deep sense of belonging and understanding.
We have had Justice from the Little Wombats program visit us. This incursion ignited curiosity and celebrated the rich heritage of Aboriginal culture.
We have had many of our families come into our classrooms to share and celebrate with us their cultural identities and share their stories. We have utilised and engaged with resources from the FKA cultural resource library to recognise and incorporate the diversity of our community and bring awareness to the wider world in which we live.
We were proud to have the opportunity to showcase all the wonderful work we do here at Glen Education through conducting tours, open day and have achieved Meeting through the education departments assessment and rating process.