Curriculum

Providing a high quality educational service
At Rutherford Street Kindergarten our focus is to make teacher child interactions positive, with teachers modelling, supporting and scaffolding learning and development and also behaviours expected from children for respecting themselves, others and the environment.

Our curriculum experiences are based on the national early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki, ensuring that learning experiences are developmentally appropriate. We use a narrative approach to children’s assessment; including learning stories with photos to document children’s progress. We encourage family/whānau to be involved in their children’s learning, both by their physical presence and through their children’s profile books. We value daily informal discussion with families, who have lots of valuable information and insights into planning for the children. We run a four-year-old transition to school program.

The teacher’s regular planning meetings share observations of children’s learning, and identifies their interests and needs. Teachers are responsible for seeing that termly assessment documentation goes into the children’s profile books and that it links to the outcomes of the planning meetings.

Non-contact time for the documentation of children’s learning has been increased to 12 ½%, meeting New Zealand’s Early Childhood Education Collective Agreement.

A focus on well-being and belonging
The program promotes the children’s sense of well-being and belonging, and their ability to communicate, contribute and explore. Whether they are engaged in daily routines, free play times or whole-group experiences they are immersed in the learning dispositions – taking an interest, being involved, persisting with difficulty, expressing their ideas/feelings and taking responsibility.

Children take an active part in the natural environment, caring for the budgie, fish, tadpoles and worm farm: and helping to recycle (saving food scraps as compost and for the worm farm; and paper for recycling) and planting/weeding/watering the gardens.

By exploring materials/areas of play that interest them, both familiar and unfamiliar, children can engage in activities for sustained periods of time. There are lots of opportunities for children to set and choose difficult tasks and to use a range of strategies to solve problems when they are ‘stuck’. Oral language, gestures, music, art, writing, using numbers and patterns and telling stories are all ways they communicate with others in the kindergarten environment. Through daily interactions with their environment children get to persist and take risks, cope with small degrees of change, help others and contribute to the program.

Communication with stakeholders
We aim for effective communication channels between the Board and staff, with monthly governance meetings, fortnightly liaison meetings between senior teacher and governance, and weekly staff meetings. We hold an annual Parent Evening. There is a three year strategic plan, an annual plan, a budget, a self review cycle, an appraisal cycle and regular policy and equipment reviews.

Respecting the rights, needs and cultures of individual children
The program actively promotes inclusiveness, fairness and equity at kindergarten. The teaching team engages in regular appraisal, reflective planning and evaluation with an emphasis on meeting the needs of all children and their families/whānau.

We actively promote bi-cultural practices in our kindergarten such as making eating times respectful and singing karakia before eating.

We make regular use of te reo Māori and include an iwi representative on our Board who can inform us, as we recognise the unique place of tangata whenua in Aotearoa/New Zealand.