Projects become a main source of learning through the use of parent interaction, community input, and child involvement. We select a topic of interest, through our observations of children, or through parent discussion, and use this as a basis to discover all about the topic. We then use parent and community involvement to assist with learning. This may include community members or families coming to visit and interacting with the children, teaching them about the interest they have at the time.

As children learn differently at each stage of development, we ensure all our children feel welcomed and confident in their rooms.

In our infants’ room, we create a warm and supportive environment to help our children gain confidence, and create attachments with our early childhood educators. In turn, this will create a basis for our infants to confidently reach their milestones with assistance and guidance, along with daily routines, which help children settle into a early child care environment. We incorporate daily living experiences, to help children gain independence, including hand washing, small group times, and self feeding. This maintains a positive learning environment and helps build the foundation for future learning experiences.

As our infants grow and move on to toddlerhood, we then are able to help set the scene for a positive educational background. Throughout our toddler age groups, children are given the opportunity to grow independently through assisted toilet training, larger group times, and free play both indoors and outdoors. Our parent involvement and community aspects become an important feature in our toddler’s learning, as it helps us create a longer lasting relationship through families and educators.

As our children are then able to proceed through to our preschool program, our children begin to be involved in our intense school readiness program. This program includes all developmental areas, including writing and pre-reading skills. We involve our children in Ant’s in the Apple, a phonics program giving our children the best start to pre-reading as required for Kindergarten, as well as many other school readiness initiatives brought out by Little Zak’s Academy.