This year, NAIDOC week is celebrated between 8th – 15th of November. NAIDOC week encourages all Australian’s to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The theme for this year is ‘Always was, always will be’ – which recognises the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for this continent for over 65,000 years. ‘Always was, always will be’ also acknowledges that hundreds of Nations and our cultures covered this continent. All were managing the land – the biggest estate on earth – to sustainably provide for their future.

For our children this celebration was about providing authentic opportunities for children to develop greater understandings about some of the customs, traditions and stories of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. This included painting using natural materials, creating and recreating aboriginal symbols, as well as making rain makers using dot inspired designs.

Our focus story ‘How the Birds got their Colours’ by Mary Albert also gave children the opportunity to explore the concept of perceptive and how stories can be told in unique, cultural ways. Furthermore, we watched the story recreated through a Plasticine animation with backing didgeridoo track. This prompted some children to share their prior and evolving knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and their stories:

An – “I hear that sound. That is the Didgeridoo sound.”

Malika – “Hearing the colours come back.”

Mason – “It’s called yellow, and black and red.”

Lovenne – “That flag is from Australia.”

Imogen – “Aboriginal people.”

Ojasvi – “I think they copied the birds like ours.”

We will continue to embed Indigenous cultures within our day-to-day teaching practices, as well as expanding our evolving knowledge of birds as we care for two zebra finches for the next few weeks.

At Alive ELC, we are committed to the enacting of the Early Years Learning Framework and strive to uphold the vision for children’s learning which is opitimised by the notions of Belonging, Being and Becoming.

We appreciate children’s identities and their experiences of belonging to their family, culture groups, neighbourhoods and the wider community. Recently, we have focused on individual and family portraiture, as well as community and cultural events, such as the mid-autumn festival where children created their own moon lanterns for the Holy Family School celebration. Furthermore, our continual promotion of relationships between children, educators and families are seen as fundamental to who children are and who they can become.

We celebrate the here and now in children’s lives and honour their time to be, to seek and to make meaning of their world. Recently, this has included role-play and imaginative explorations, as well as creating racetracks to explore identity and take on the roles of e.g. track marshal and traffic light attendant. Thus, promoting the collaboration, co-operation and sense of being as part of our early learning community.

In accordance to our Alive vision, we are committed to being a learning environment where futures begin. Our practices therefore, reflect and respond to the significant changes that contribute to who the children are becoming as valued members of society. This includes providing children with opportunities to develop their own unique identities, knowledge, understandings, capacities, skills and relationships. We value our connection to Holy Family School and use this partnership to provide meaningful opportunities for children to actively participate in experiences on offer in the school. Recently, this has included Buddy class visits, Dining Hall, Library visits and Whole School assemblies.

This week the children have continued to develop their connections to the Holy Family School Community. This has included visiting the Log Park, participating in Spanish class as well as joining year 3 for ‘investigate play’ time on Friday morning. We see these visits as valuable opportunities for children to engage with and develop a sense of belonging to the School Community. Thus, providing authentic learning engagements that will help children to build connections and partnerships that support them in feeling confident in their transition to School. The social and varying contextual aspects will contribute to the transitions of all children including those moving on to Holy Family or to a school on a different site.

We look forward to building further connections with Holy Family over the course of this year and beyond.

Today we celebrated Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday signals the beginning of Lent, a special time of 40 days in the lead up to Easter. During Lent, we are called to live the values of the Gospels such as kindness and compassion and to give to others.

This afternoon, children in St Anne had a special prayer service for Ash Wednesday. They learnt that purple is the colour used to represent the Lenten season and that the cross with ash on our foreheads reminds us to be kind and think of others, just like Jesus. We discussed ways we could fill each other’s buckets during Lent.

Charlotte said ‘Joel fills my bucket when he runs with me’.

Oscar said ‘my mum plays with me and that really fills up my bucket’.

Kunal said ‘I can help my friends and play with them’.

Children were invited to receive the ashes if they wished.

As teachers and educators, we continually reflect upon our practice, observe and document children’s learning and incorporate children’s interests into the program to enable excellent learning outcomes for our children.

Over the past weeks, the teachers have been focusing on creating irresistible learning environments by providing opportunities for children to interact with a variety of materials and tools to express their knowledge, feelings, thoughts and understandings. Our teachers – Nicole, Michelle and Emmaline, along with our educators Palwinder, Namita and Alex have been researching the following question:

We have been experimenting with providing a variety of loose parts in children’s play. Loose parts enables our children to explore the many possibilities of learning. Children bring to the materials their creativity, imagination, abstract thinking and problem solving skills.

As seen in this photo, Tavae has used loose parts to count and match the dots on the dice. With the dice and small wooden rounds, Tavae demonstrated his numeracy understandings and abilities – one to one correspondence when counting and matching amounts.

“Children do not wait for our permission to think. Indeed, children are bursting with ideas that are always impatient to escape through language (and we say a hundred languages) to connect and communicate with the things of the world.”  Loris Malaguzzi.

As we continue our project and inquiry ‘growth’, we are incorporating the use of digital technologies as a tool for children to express and further explore their knowledge, understandings, theories and concepts of our natural world.

Today the following questions were posed to the children whilst sitting outside in our garden:

What is nature?

What grows?

Children’s initial responses were:

Frankie: leaves

Krisha: tree

Kunal: I see birds.

Charlie: The trees and pears.

Ojasvi: I see it up there (points to the tree), the leaf.

These children were then invited to use the iPads to take photos e.g. Frankie to take a photo of leaves, Krisha of a tree, etc.

Arabella viewed one of her photos more closely.

Nicole: (teacher): What do you see?

Arabella: A leaf.

Nicole: Do you notice anything about this leaf?

Arabella: I see the lines on the leaf, a long line.

Nicole: I see that line too. Can you see any other lines?

Arabella: Some go there and there.

Nicole: I can see those lines too. I wonder why the leaves have these lines?

Arabella: They there to grow.

Other children such as Will, Liam, Ellara, Xavier and Jon became intrigued by the children photographing our environment. They added their theories about nature and growth and also took photos of their ideas.

Krisha: It’s the grass

Xavier: the tree

Omelia: the leaf

Jon: I photo the tree, the sky, the tree the sky.

Ojasvi: And the tree fell down.

Jon: I take photo of the grass.

Ellara: Plants and nature is Australian.

Will: A tree and I also took a photo of the sun and me.

During our afternoon group meeting, we shared the photos that children took during the day.

The questions were again posed to the children:

What is nature?

What grows?

The children responded:

Jon: Water

Arabella: Flowers

Olivia: Plants

Ellara: We can make the grow by seeds and water

Charlie: You put the seed in the ground and it grows

Kunal: I photo of the sun.

Sharing learning, ideas and understandings with each other enables children to not only express their own learning but to also learn from others. This group meeting gave children the opportunity to contribute to a growing and collective understanding of nature and the environment. Group meetings also encourage the understanding that learning is not a linear or isolated process but rather collaborative, ongoing and lifelong.

The children’s ideas and theories of nature and growth have evolved over the day and will continue to do so as we explore these questions in different ways, with different materials and tools and through opportunities to share with each other.

Our Philosophy:

We recognise the role of context and environment in children’s learning and therefore we will extend children’s learning experience into the wider community through connections with the school and wider school community.

Today we celebrated the Moon Lantern Festival with Holy Family Catholic School.

We attended the assembly at the school where we learnt more about the Moon Lantern Festival, watched some children perform a traditional Vietnamese dance and were enthralled by the lion dance (performed by Mr Stramare, Mrs Nicosia and Miss Batifuoco).

Mr White and Mr Slater also announced the winners of the lantern making competition – and ELC won! We won a prize for creativity. We were very proud!

For lunch, Brianna prepared fried rice and it was delicious!

We have had a beautiful day, enjoying the sunshine and engaging in lots of learning.

Our day began with some singing. Janine is a wonderful singer and guitarist. She played ‘Wheels on the Bus’ for us. We loved singing along with the actions.

This morning, a group of children visited the library. We read the book ‘Allergic Alpaca’

We discussed different parts of the story and shared what we liked about the book.

Will: She kicked the apple away and I liked the funny voice you were doing Nicole.
Arielle: The apples falling down.
Tesi: There was an avalanche and made boom, crash.
Omelia: There was apples falling on the tree.
Xavier: The applies.
Ellara: I liked about doing stuff the alpaca.

We then chose some picture books to read with a friend.

Once back at the ELC, we helped Nicole to clean our chicks brooding box and fill up their food and water containers. We then observed our chicks, and held them gently. They are so soft.

The theme of prayer today was belonging. We shared where we feel we belong and why.

In home 2, we engaged in a variety of provocations based on our interests and our inquiry projects of ‘belonging’ and ‘growth’. Some of us also worked with Nicole in a focused learning group, focused on writing our names and identifying the letters in our names.

Outside we enjoyed the glorious sunshine. We have been building our ‘belonging’ with group games. Today we were skipping together and playing games with the rope ‘jump the snake’.

Finally, we shared our specks of gold for the day.