- Email: wecare@rachelsplace.com.au
- Phone: 0413 307 933
- Address: 111 Vulture Street, West End, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, 4101
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Rachel's Place uses both the Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF) and the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guideline (QKLG), National Quality Standards, United Nations Rights of the Child and Code of Ethics in conjunction with our philosophy to develop a community based on quality outcomes.
Rachel's Place provides a child-centred approach to learning and care. We believe children are competent individuals full of potential, who are active participants in determining their play and learning. It is innate for them to utilise their environments and social groupings to learn, explore, create, test out their ideas, observe, reflect and develop their understanding from their experiences.
Our service is dedicated to excellence in early childhood education. Play is seen as integral tool that children use to create understanding of their world. Our program's is play based and its emphasis is on allocating significant amounts of time to informal play and spontaneous interactive play in naturally occurring groups.
Planned group projects are also facilitated within the centre with an aim to encourage and allow children to work collaboratively, in which individuals contribute at their level of competence. Children are also offered many opportunities and experiences led by educators based on children's interests and needs. This approach is called an emergent curriculum.
Children's ability to interact with their peers and learn from their experiences is highly valued and encouraged. Mistakes are seen as learning opportunities. Social development is seen as important alongside an individual's developmental milestones. Expression of children's ideas, thoughts and feelings and understandings of events are integral to our program.
The physical environment that children play in is important in creating a space that is welcoming and inviting for children's exploration and learning. Our environments use many open ended resources with a view to children being able to create their playscapes and adapt them to their ideas and interests.
To ensure a balance of safety and inspiring play and learning, we have designed our indoor and outdoor play area to meet all children's needs. Our backyard is designed to evoke imagination and exploration. Our discovery garden is multi layered, with little nooks and areas for quiet play as well as more open areas for more vigorous play.
Climbing equipment is not higher than 500 millimetres to allow for the safety of our younger children. Older children are offered opportunities to meet their need to climb and take risks through tree climbing and our modular climbing equipment. We have a variety of wooden partitions that we move around as needed to create spaces for older children to play safely with toys such as lego and woodwork.
The centre runs an open plan indoor/outdoor program. We have family groupings, where children are grouped in mixed ages. Throughout the day we use a number of methods to enhance both the warmth and family feel of the children's experience and to maximise the benefits of being in a mixed age environment.
We believe that having a mixed age group encourages a rich educational and care environment.
Benefits of mixed age groupings:
Our projects are child led and developed in conjunction with the educators, parents and the community. Projects may last a week, a month or many months. Our educators have developed their expertise in observing, questioning and discussing with children on their interests and introducing opportunities that inspire children to explore and discover more about those areas.
Are skilled at observing, understanding children and improvising with our environments to respond to children's active curiosity and innate love of learning. Rachel's Place believes that we are forever students, and as such we are co-learning and collaborating alongside the children. Our teachers actively engage with the children and join in the activities creating a rich and joyful experience for everyone. Unexpected avenues brought to light by the children can often be the most valued learning.
It is when we are actively interested in something that our learning has a depth and enthusiasm not found elsewhere. As such we endeavor to create learning environments and curriculum that draw from and are responsive to children's interests, strengths and emerging skills. Our Educators aim to inspire creativity, problem solving and enable and facilitate children to be self guided, while ensuring that they have many learning opportunities to develop skills in all the developmental areas.
Our educators work collaboratively with all the children. We have a shared responsibility for the children, the resources and the environment we work and play in. This means that children develop warm connected relationships with all our staff. Children can access assistance and comfort from those staff they feel most connected with. Individual educators are responsible for the development of care and education plans for specific children, tracking and extending children's development and learning over time.
We work as a team to follow children's interests and needs, we plan out projects and groups as a whole with combined ideas drawn from children's interests strengths and emerging skills for intentional and spontaneous experiences for the children.
Children's thoughts feelings ideas and learning are documented in meaningful ways for children, families and the community using many different mediums including photographs, examples of children's work, children's portfolios and arts projects.
We view parents as children's primary teachers, as such they are a vital element in the education and wellbeing of their children. We see the team at Rachel's Place as a partner and resource to a child's family. As such the curriculum is a collaboration of ideas and resources from children, parents, families and our teachers.
Our vision is to create a learning community for both children and adults. Rachel's Place fosters the development of parenting resources, support programs and groups to assist in the development of this learning community.
We aim to be an active member of the West End community. We believe that the issues and interests of members of our community inspire interest and learning in us all. It is often this collective interest alongside our diversity that binds us as a community.
