Physical environment - key to success at Abacus Stanhope gardens
Using the outdoor Using the outdoor environment to support quality teaching and learning is the aim of the Giant Giraffes team at Stanhope Gardens.
In a well-established, centre at Stanhope Gardens, Nominated Supervisor Heather said their large, outdoor area was perfect for extending learning and supporting our activities through Sustainability week.
Our plan is to build garden beds and plant our vegetables and flowers, create a mud kitchen and a water play area. We will be getting chickens when they are old enough for our chicken coop.
It's sustainability week, and our team is Promoting awareness of the environment through 'green housekeeping practices' such as healthy eating, gardening, minimizing waste, recycling and reducing water and energy consumption. Assist children in developing an understanding and respect for the environment and encourage critical thinking.
The team in Giant giraffes used old jeans as planters to plant some succulents in our garden. They also collected some tomato tins from the kitchen, and painted them, and are going to use theses for playing ball game in our outdoor area.
The educators promote sustainable practices by demonstrating how we can reduce and reuse things from our everyday living but promoting sustainability week help us to get our wonderful parents involved.
The Team in Giraffes room took Sustainability week in their stride and used it to their advantage and read a book about "Compost". The children learnt that making a compost was also a great way to recycle scrapes. They also learnt that we can only compost veggie scraps, tea bags, paper, grass clippings and leave.
We are planning to get a worm farm, which the worms help to make the compost by eating away the food scraps and with a little patience the compost will turn into beautiful fertilizer/soil for the garden.
The Giraffes also collected food scraps from our cook and put it into the compost bin.
Miss Vasavi asked the children, What can we put inside our compost bin?
"We can put apples and bananas" said Vihaan
"We can put veggies" said Leo
"We can put grapes" said jay
"We can put grass" said Abhay
"We can put pears" said harshita
"We can put leaves" said Ishaan
"We can put egg shells" Said Ryan
"We cannot put meat" said Jasnam
"We cannot put the rubbish" said Ziva.
We have educators in place to guide and support the children, but we do try to encourage them to be capable learners who can use the environments independently.
They critically reflect about how best to design and set out learning opportunities to achieve the most benefit to children's learning and development.
She said well-designed, reflective, effective child-centered enabling environments supported quality teaching and learning and were a key element of the Early Years Learning Framework and a focus of the National Quality Standards