Young children are active learners
Children’s learning experiences gain meaning by their relevance to life. Young children are foremost doers. They learn through imitating activities, which are around them, through play and example.
Through watching, listening and trying out, they gradually discover themselves and an ever-widening environment. Young children need a secure and nourishing environment, where they can feel at home and where their imagination is given space and time to grow in play and work.
Importance of Rhythm
The kindergarten day is structured in such a way, that its rhythm creates a balance between indoors and outdoors, play and rest, calm and busy time, teacher lead activities and child initiated time. This structure of the day becomes a familiar routine for the children, brings security and helps the children to gain a sense of belonging and to support their growing confidence.
The daily rhythm is in bedded in the recurring cycle of the seasons of the year through activities and the seasonal festivals.
Enabling and Nurturing Environment
The Garden is a woodland garden on a slope, with a sandpit, a tree swing, a tree house, a clay bread oven, a vegetable plot, a shelter, and a little garden shed. The kindergarten space is overlooking the bigger St. Luke’s garden, which is a haven for wildlife with mature trees, shrubs, reeds, and a pond.
In the garden of Sunlands, you will see the children playing in the sandpit, digging the earth, looking for creatures and treasures, taking turns on the tree swing, playing in the treehouse, hiding in the bushes or helping one of the teachers with the garden work. Being active outside in all weathers, helps the children to gain an awareness of nature within the changing seasons, they welcome the first snowdrops in Springtime, play in the long grass in Summer, love raking the leaves in the Autumn winds and wait for the ice to be formed on the lake in Winter.
Being outside on a daily basis, working or playing in a group, or on their own, strengthens the children’s emotional and social nature, and the different physical activities of digging, climbing, walking, raking, etc. will support the children’s strength and health and help to develop their fine and gross motor skills.
Kindergarten Room
Our kindergarten room is a beautiful, peaceful, warm and clean space, where the children can feel at home, play, learn and enjoy themselves. The layout and the organization of the room is consciously chosen to suit the rhythm of the kindergarten morning. Toys and equipment are arranged in such a way, that the children can have independent access and are safe to use. They provide the tools and objects for construction and for interactive and imaginative play activity.
Everything that the children use has its place and the children learn in “tidy up time” to put everything back neatly and carefully, ready for the next days’ play.
