Hearts and Minds Early Learning McKellar

Hearts and Minds Early Learning McKellar believes early childhood education should be intentionally diverse, inclusive, and layered. The learning experiences implemented in our environments cover all critical subject areas and learning dispositions, such as the creative and performing arts, indigenous perspectives, community and culture, wellbeing, STEM learning, literacy and language, numeracy, sustainability, and fundamental movement and skills. 

To ensure that all our routines and daily programme cater to all children, we have an Educational Leader who is passionate about new teaching approaches. He is available to all educators for support and advice. He also conducts individual mentoring sessions with staff to ensure they are heard and can ask questions. To support peer interactions, we provide group experiences in the rooms. We also have two playgrounds for younger and older children. Our educators use strategies like collaborating, encouraging, identifying, listening, modelling, and providing choice. To build on children's strengths, we design our curriculum to support their interests, scaffold their learning, and gain family input. We set up a learning environment based on each child's strengths. To encourage children's engagement, we critically reflect on our pedagogy and curriculum every week, and if any barriers are identified, we address them. We provide various training sessions for our educators, such as behaviour management, inclusion support, and interactions with children.