From the Director of Early Learning
Dear Families
This week, we celebrate the beautiful people in our lives with our breakfast for fathers and special friends. At these times, we stop to recognise the significance of our community and the possibilities for building relationships around our children. For us, this is beyond an event, it is about creating a shared place for relationships at the ELC.
For the child, the ELC is not merely a place of being cared for, it is a place where life is being lived. We endeavour not to isolate relationships in compartments as this is not real life. We do not just want to share the magical moments at Parent-Teacher Conversations, but rather embed them in everyday life.
As I looked around my Playgroup last Wednesday, I saw the family groupings differing from the past. There is not a dominance of mothers or grandmothers but rather a spread of fathers, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers. This warmed my heart to consider the significance of our welcome to the Centre for these families as being a place that truly values the participation of the adults sharing the child’s life.
Thank you for your participation; for your willingness to see this as an essential component of the early years.
We wish you all a wonderful weekend ahead with your loved ones.
Wishing Miss Mos a Speedy Recovery
We’d like to wish Miss Mos a speedy recovery as she takes leave for the rest of the term. We look forward to welcoming her back in Term 4.
Kind regards
Kate Mount
Director of Early Learning
Save the Date
Monday 2 September: Reception Twilight Tour of Junior School, 5pm
Wednesday 11 September: Grandparents and Special Friends’ Afternoon Tea, 2pm
Friday 27 September: Term 3 ends
ELC Enrolments for 2020
Our ELC Enrolments and Finance Officer, Sarah Elliott, has now sent out enrolment offers for ELC in 2020. We have taken into account any requests for additional days next year, and would also like to remind families of the minimum three day requirement once your child turns four years old.
We would also like to remind families that, if you do not wish to continue next year, one term’s notice is required. While we understand that circumstances change for families, we do appreciate the immediate communication with us when this has been the case. There is significant demand for places in 2020 and we have done our best to cater for all of our families. If you have any queries regarding ELC enrolments, please contact Sarah Elliott via selliott@stpetersgirls.sa.edu.au
Official Opening of the ELC Community Garden
We are officially opening our ELC Community Garden at our Grandparents and Special Friends’ Breakfast on September 11.
We invite families to come along and support this occasion. As you know, Ned has been working extremely hard to create the garden that the children designed. As a teaching team, we wrote the intentions and ethos behind the garden and we would like to share this with you.
Nurturing and sustaining our natural environment are key roles we have as citizens of our world. We take responsibility for building a foundation of experience for these areas across the Early Learners’ Centre. We embark on embedding cultural, ethical and ecological understandings through our daily life and investigations throughout our learning environment and beyond.
The introduction of our ELC Community Garden provides us with a vehicle for embedding these understandings, taking active responsibility for its care and function. It enables community action for a shared purpose and provides a place for deep connection, relationships and research. Through daily interactions, it will develop as a place where joy, respect, wonder and anticipation are inherent.
Our intention is to create a space where community members are welcomed to participate alongside each other, encouraging the sharing of experience and responsibility. The cycle of learning through our garden will build upon experiences children share within their own families, cultures and beyond.
Kate Mount
Director of Early Learning
Grandparents and Special Friends’ Afternoon Tea
You are invited to the ELC to celebrate with the children the significance of special people in our lives.
Wednesday 11 September
2 – 3.30pm
ELC Garden, Hallett Road, Stonyfell
Afternoon tea will be provided, and we will be officially opening the ELC Community Garden.
ELC Immunisation Policy
Under the Government’s No Jab No Pay policy, families must meet immunisation requirements to receive the Child Care Subsidy. Further information is available from the Department of Health by clicking here.
Children with high risk conditions, as well as children who are not immunised against them, may be excluded from the ELC in accordance with the ‘Staying Healthy: Preventing infectious diseases in early childhood education and care services’ guidelines. Please refer to our Exclusion Policy for further information.
Common illnesses requiring exclusion include:
Influenza
Chicken Pox
Conjunctivitis
Diarrhoea
Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease
High Temperature
Infectious Hepatitis
Measles
Meningitis
Mumps
Rubella (German Measles)
Scabies
Scarlet Fever
School Sores (Impetigo)
Upper Respiratory Tract Infection
Vomiting
Whooping Cough
Reception Twilight Tour
The Director of Early Learning, Kate Mount, and the Head of Junior School, Suzanne Haddy, warmly invite you to attend a Twilight Tour of the Reception classrooms.
Monday 2 September at 5pm
Meet in the Arts Centre foyer for refreshments
This is a perfect opportunity to meet Ms Haddy as well as our Reception teachers
and hear all about how your daughter can become a Saints School Girl.
RSVP to Enrolments Director Jess Geraghty via jgeraghty@stpetersgirls.sa.edu.au
Absences in the ELC
Student Absences
Please notify the School via one of the following methods for late arrivals/early departures and absences, ensuring a reason for the absence is included.
Text: 0428 601 957 (save to phone contacts as SPGS)
Email: attendance@stpetersgirls.sa.edu.au
Phone: 8334 2200 or phone the relevant room as per the contact list
Feel free to also include the relevant room teacher when sending via email.
ELC Room Contacts:
Bell Yett – 8155 5777
Ferguson – 8155 5776
Hallett – 8155 5775
Stonyfell – 8155 5778
Kate Mount
Director of Early Learning
来自黄老师的信息
他用两手攀着上面，两脚再向上缩；他肥胖的身子向左微倾，显出努力的样子，这时我看见他的背影，我的泪很快地流下来了。我赶紧拭干了泪。怕他看见，也怕别人看见。我再向外看时，他已抱了朱红的桔子往回走了。
—-朱自清《背影》
亲爱的家长朋友们，
在这周的特别早餐会上，我们为我们生命中伟大的爸爸以及朋友们庆祝属于他们的节日。而这样一个有意义的节日，它不仅仅只是我们ELC的一个活动，更是我们围绕着孩子，巩固我们的纽带。而我们的ELC也不仅仅只是一个学校，更是我们小朋友生活息息相关的另一个“家园”。我们希望通过每一次的庆祝活动，和小朋友们、家长朋友们建立更深刻的关系。这样的关系也不仅仅只是建立在老师和家长一对一的交谈会上，更是深深融入到小朋友的日常生活的点点滴滴中去。
在上周三的Playgroup，我们园长很高兴见到了许多不同以往的“新面孔”。在这里热烈欢迎我们每一个家庭成员的参与，不仅仅是妈妈们，更期待爸爸们，阿姨叔叔们，外公外婆们，爷爷奶奶们的参与。在ELC，我们真挚的期待所有家庭成员们一同和我们分享你们孩子的每一个成长瞬间。
同样感谢你们愿意来和我们共同谱写孩子们的童年乐章。
在这里我们预祝大家渡过一个美好的父亲节周末。
Emma works in Learning Community 2 on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays from 9am – 5pm, and Jade works 11am – 6pm every day in Learning Community 1.
Farewell to Miss So
We’d like to wish Miss So farewell (for now) and good luck as she begins maternity leave at the end of Week 7, and embarks on a wonderful and exciting new journey. We will miss her, and can’t wait to meet the new addition to our ELC community soon enough.
Kate Mount
Director of Early Learning
Learning Community 1
News from the Stonyfell Room
As the children and educators visit the ELC Community Garden project each day, we are finding more and more things to discuss. This is not limited to what may be planted in the garden beds. We find that this new space is one of many possibilities, one that allows the children to observe both the outside world of Hallett Road through the fence, and the inside world of the ELC. It is a place where we can discover where we fit into our wider community. We are an ELC, but we are connected to others who are living their lives around us.
Our relationship with Kaurna land and culture remains strong in this space. We have taken our ‘Bam bam balya’ (Morning Meeting) into the Community Garden, making our way down there to the sound of the clapsticks and singing ‘Ngyunkina miyana’ as we go. We say our Acknowledgement in the understanding that our ELC Community Garden is on Kaurna land, just as when we are in Ferguson Park or in our classroom. Many of the children know that the garden is on Kaurna land and this is evidence of how far they have come in their knowledge and understanding of our culture.
Recently, we were given a lovely gift by Hudson’s grandmother, Nanny Heather, which is supporting our connection to Kaurna culture and the land. This is a beautiful rock that has a love heart shape in the middle of it, and it was found by Heather on Kaurna land. She has kept this rock for a long time and wanted to give it to us because she can see the respect we have for the land and the Kaurna people. We have now developed a new ritual for our bam bam balya: The Ritual of the Rock. We pass this from one friend to another, feeling the weight and texture of the rock, and passing it into the hands of another friend. We look at the symbol of the love heart as we do this, and what we are experiencing is actually very spiritual. We are immensely grateful to Heather and Hudson for sharing this precious rock with us, which has meant so much to their family.
How fortunate we are to be living and learning in a community that values relationships above all else. Our relationships with our environment, the land and the people.
Mel Angel
News from the Bell Yett Room
“It’s a community before a garden.”
Currently, our ELC Community Garden is a space with no growing garden. Our children wonder, ‘Why are we calling it a garden if there are no plants growing?’ As educators of young children, our days are a balance between fulfilling a responsibility to provide knowledge and purposefully encouraging children to use their imagination to find the answers for themselves. Upon exploring the empty garden beds, we have shared with our children that we cannot plant just yet because it is too cold. Many plants need a lot of sun to be happy and to grow well. Our children have accepted this reasoning and quickly moved on to uncover all the other possibilities this space holds for us…can we find purpose in this space while we are waiting to begin planting?
Across the ELC, we have begun to discover there is opportunity for creativity and imagination in the waiting…we have discovered a family of caterpillars and built a home for them out of bark chips. Small groups have planted baby dolls in the garden beds to help them ‘grow faster’. We’ve experimented with water and how it changes the soil, and used magnifying glasses to find the ‘dirt bugs’ crawling on the wood. Our most significant observation is that our children move together in this space, recognising the joy in making a discovery alongside another and sharing the wonderment.
Each day that we enter the ELC Community Garden, we acknowledge why there is no garden for us yet, and the opportunities for learning about waiting have been rich. What is growing, however, is how familiar, confident and connected we are in this space. We are already existing in this space as a community, and as a community, we will be ready to grow and care for a garden.
We invite you to join us for the official opening of the ELC Community Garden at the Grandparents and Special Friends’ Afternoon Tea on September 11.
Annabelle Redmond
Learning Community 2
News from the Ferguson Room
Deepening our connection to living things – creative explorations with our caterpillars
We are all born into an ecosystem. We are all interconnected and intertwined and we all have the capacity for developing relationships with the living things around us. Children are instinctively drawn to living things and naturally curious about them. This has been apparent in our explorations in both Ferguson Park and in the ELC Community Garden. The discovery of a range of creatures has captured the imagination and attention of the children and they have expressed a desire to find out more about what is living in the world around them. In order to for us to truly know these things, it is important for us to explore them in a range of contexts.
The children have been using the language of photography to capture and share their discoveries with their peers and educators. A driving focus for the children has been our resident caterpillars in the ELC Community Garden. We have photographed, videoed, talked to and observed them. Our next step has been to encourage the children to explore them through a range or artistic languages. These have included:
- drawing
- painting
- clay
- collage
- dance
The intention behind these experiences has been for the children to slow down and tune in their noticing. To focus on the details they can see, the colours and patterns on the caterpillar’s body, the shapes they make and the way they move. To support this careful noticing, the children have been exploring with a range of technologies to enhance their observation skills. These have included:
- magnifying glasses
- magnifying lenses on the iPads
- digital microscope
The details they are seeing are beginning to be reflected in their work, and we know over time, these explorations will continue to support the children’s fine motor skills, observational skills and creativity.
Laura Reiters
News from the Hallett Room
In the ELC, we have, for many years, been inspired by the work of Ann Pelo, an America educator with a passion for ecology in early childhood. We often refer to one of her journal articles, A Pedagogy for Ecology, as a compass for guiding our work with children.
She states that an “. . . ecological identity, born in a particular place, opens children to a broader connection with the earth; love for a specific place makes possible love for other places. An ecological identity allows us to experience the earth as our home ground and leaves us determined to live in honorable relationship with our planet.” This belief has been pivotal in supporting the relationship we have developed with Ferguson Park.
We entered the term with the new space of our ELC Community Garden to encounter, and returned to this article for guidance. While we patiently wait for the time of planting to arrive, we are taking our time to nurture this space into a place; a place of research, culture and community. We have begun following some of Ann Pelo’s suggested principles for cultivating a love of place:
- walk the land
- learn the names
- explore new perspectives
- learn the stories
- tell the stories
As we embrace this time of waiting with the children, we have been exploring and imagining the possibilities of the ELC Community Garden. Through daily experiences within the garden, we have observed the children begin to create narratives around this new place, with the resident caterpillars as the main characters. The children have created connections as they discover clues that the caterpillars from our garden might also be living in Ferguson Park too.
The children are using a variety of expressive languages to tell their stories. Through dance, sculpture, collage and illustration, the children are experimenting with clay, paint, drawing tools, video, photography and a range of intelligent and repurposed materials to create their stories of the Garden of Possibilities. We look forward to sharing these stories with you through our Learning Community Home Page which you can access via myLink in your child’s portfolio, and on the walls of our rooms.
We invite your perspectives by sharing your hopes for our ELC Community Garden with us and we look forward to travelling this journey from space to place with you.
Nell Tierney and Leanne Williams
