Clovelly Child Care Centre
Safe, happy and sustainable place
We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land and pay our respects to the Elders both past and present.
Our Centre
Clovelly Child Care Centre is a community based, non-profit, parent managed, long day care service. The centre is licensed for 59 children a day and caters for 90 children and 81 families over the week. We are open for 49 weeks of the year from 8am to 6pm weekdays, closing for annual holidays over Christmas and into January.
The Centre’s program promotes a play-based learning environment and the holistic development of children.
It takes a village to raise a child
Our team shares the same vision of the importance of Early Childhood learning. We recognize that our children are individuals and in the same way the members in our team are individuals too with different strengths and cultural contexts. We also know individuals unite to create our school community. We will strive to build strong relationships and ensure that getting to know each other and learning together is authentic, collaborative, interactive, joyful meaningful and respectful.
We believe children deserve an education that nurtures their being.
Learning is not for the mind alone.
It is necessary to educate the whole child, which for us means to nourish the mind, body, and spirit. We hope to do this by carefully preparing a rich environment filled with open ended materials and play based opportunities that will fire up their imagination, inspire ideas, creativity, and develop higher thinking skills.
It is just as vital to strengthen the body through healthy eating, daily exercise, and regular access to the outdoors, taking risks and engaging in free and unfretted play. Building resilience occurs when children are encouraged to take risks and learn to be independent. Having freedom to discover one’s own limitations is necessary for building autonomy. Lastly it is equally important to nourish the human spirit by surrounding the child with love, mindfulness, grace, courtesy, and respect.
Our spaces and places
We have prepared our environment that fosters independence and autonomy, a balance between limits and freedom. We want to support our children to make their own choices and the cultivate an atmosphere of respect for the environment and others. Since we believe that children are capable and active learners, we trust them in making their own work choices with the help of a beautifully and mindfully prepared environment that invites them to use the open-ended materials through play.
This perspective incorporates ideas from both the Montessori and Reggio Emilia ideas which believe that environments shape children’s exploration. Malaguzzi, a founder of the Reggio Emilia philosophy has emphasised the beauty of the environment which, indeed, becomes “the third teacher” because beauty enlivens the senses and, since children are sensory learners, they are inspired by beautiful and meaningful objects.
According to Malaguzzi children have 100 languages for learning and therefore we as educators need to have 100 languages in our classroom to support and strengthen the love, joy, and wonder of learning.
