Our Programs
Our Curriculum
We believe children learn through play, and it is for this reason we provide programs which are play based. We provide a continuous developmental curriculum designed specifically to nurture your child’s emerging capabilities.
We tailor our program to meet the needs of individual children and their families while taking into consideration our centres philosophy. Our curriculum offers a healthy balance of freedom to encourage individual growth as well as structure to promote cognitive skills.
Busy Bees Childcare Centre’s curriculum is always developing and changing taking into consideration the individual developmental needs of children, the understanding that children learn in a variety of ways and that children can vary in their capabilities and pace of learning.
The curriculums are also based on The Early Years Learning Framework – Belonging, Being and Becoming.
Educators use a variety of documentation to observe all children’s learning (individual and group) taking into consideration their skill levels, personality, interests and the needs of the families.
From this documentation and the input from the families our educators are better able to develop a comprehensive teaching curriculum aimed at assisting the children to develop their independence, confidence and skills through play, experimentation and exploration.
Early Years Learning Framework – Belonging, Being and Becoming:
- Each child’s learning will be based on their interests and strengths and guided by our educators.
- Educators will work in collaboration with families to provide relevant learning experiences for each child, based on their interests and family experiences.
- Every child will be equally valued and their achievements and learning celebrated.
- Educators will observe and record the strengths and learning of each child.
- Educators will work closely with children and families to generate ideas for the curriculum.
- Learning outcomes will be linked to the curriculum during and after each child’s learning has occurred.
- The curriculum will be based on the children’s interests, educators extending children’s interests, spontaneous experiences and family input.
- Where appropriate, the service will liaise with external agencies and support persons to best educate and care for children with additional needs.
- Where appropriate the curriculum (play and learning experiences) will build and develop each child’s learning stories, portfolio and observations of each child’s strengths and achievements.
- The curriculum will be evaluated and reflected upon each week by educators.
Parent Involvement in Curriculum
Parents are welcome to visit the centre at any time and we invite all parents to be involved in the curriculum. Parents may like to share skills or talents or have ideas that could help broaden the scope of our curriculum. For instance, we have had family members come in to play a variety of instruments for the children, a dentist who spoke to the children about dental health and another parent involved us all in making paper. Parents may also have access to various resource materials which the children could use such as corks, beer and milk bottle tops, fabric and lace scraps, chocolate wrappers, sturdy plastic containers for home corner or the sandpit, boxes—small ones such as toothpaste, makeup, medicine and muesli bar boxes and at the other extreme, big boxes like fridge/washing machine boxes which we can use as temporary cubby houses.
Of course, we encourage parents to communicate their ideas, thoughts, queries, concerns and satisfaction or otherwise with us as this helps to modify, build and strengthen our program and its relevance to the families at Busy Bees at any given time. Parents are invited to participate in our ongoing system of policy review. Various policies are posted in the entry area for a fortnight at a time and parents are encouraged to read them and comment. Ideas for discussion, improving or making our policies more relevant to our current group of families are welcomed.