Newman College loves the uniqueness and energy of small children. We offer a personalised approach to learning in a safe and supportive environment at our Early Childhood Education campus. The primary intake year is Kindergarten.
We weave an informal and flexible play-based learning approach designed to move a child through a developmental pathway towards literacy and numeracy. Throughout the journey, families remain our closest partners in this process.
Our program promotes the development of children who demonstrate the attributes of autonomy, curiosity, persistence, reasoning, problem-solving, responsibility, imagination and creativity.
Through Kindergarten towards Year 2 our children will transition from wondering about ‘what’ and ‘why’ towards learning ‘how’ to do things.
The Nature Play Initiative provides students at Newman College with natural, adventurous, and engaging play spaces. These enhance every aspect of their development and early learning. It encourages our children’s love of nature and learning. In doing so, this delivers benefits in health, cognitive, social and emotional development. It also builds resilience, creativity and environmental stewardship in our children.
Natural play spaces use a blend of natural areas, environmental features and plants. This engages and challenges children, while encourage them to learn about the natural world around them. Swings, slides and elements typically found in ‘pre-formed’ playgrounds are included, but natural play spaces focus on also offering ‘unstructured’ activities for learning. Therefore, children are able to participate in spontaneous and imaginative play and problem-solving.
Some of the typical elements of a functional and effective nature play space include:
A nature zone (e.g. plants/trees and loose materials like pebbles).
Bark, rocks, nuts, sticks etc.
Sandpit and digging patch.
Water play.
Outdoor meeting spaces/cubby structures.
Equipment for loco motor development (e.g. balancing, swinging, sliding, climbing).
Music.
Early Learning Ideas Lab
The Ideas Lab at Newman College is the latest edition to our teaching and learning landscape. Designed to inspire our early learning students from Pre-Kindy to Year 2, the Ideas Lab comes from the concept of a ‘Makerspace’. Moreover, this is a place for children to explore, create and work collaboratively together.
It is a community centre with tools that combine equipment, community and education for the purpose of enabling students to design, prototype and create. Newman College aspires to grow creative lifelong thinkers.
Therefore, it is not about the teachers having the right methodology to generate an answer, it is about setting tasks where there can be multiple pathways to a finishing point. The Ideas Lab is a tangible resource for students to explore these paths for themselves.
Parent Engagement – SeeSaw
Early Childhood Education can be complex for families to understand. However, parents of primary school students can use SeeSaw to engage with their child’s learning experience. Teachers use SeeSaw to showcase the work of children and the class. Think of this as the mechanism to enlighten your understanding of your child’s education. No longer when you ask the question, “what did you do at school today”; will the answer “nothing” suffice. SeeSaw displays images of your child’s work, assessments, tasks and more. Parents can therefore interact with this work and with the teachers.
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