Bush Kinder
The Junior Kinder and Kinder rooms both operate a funded Kindergarten Program.
Our Junior Kinder offers a funded 3-year-old kindergarten program on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Our Kinder offers a funded 4-year-old kindergarten program from Monday to Friday.
As an exceeding centre, we are consistently seeking for better approaches, pedagogies and practices to foster children’s holistic growth, through learning and playing. Based on our daily observations and evaluations, all educators and staff at Kids on Mullum highly believe an essential component of children’s learning should be involving natural resources, inspiring environments and the benefits of risky play.
By establishing and maintaining the bush kinder program, we expect each child to receive responsive, supportive and deliberate learning opportunities within the natural environment and educational settings. With the aim of fostering future-ready learners with agency and strengthening children’s connection with the world they live in, we adapt the place-based approach and value the significance of ‘environment as the third educator’; diverse learning contents will be elaborated and further extended through weekly programs and evaluations.
Value and benefits of the program:
Future citizens need to develop global awareness and be active in sustainable, environment management. The notion of exposure to ‘place’ in an Australian ‘bush’ setting is one method of developing children’s connection to nature. A child’s biophilia, or love of, and affinity with nature, underpins the existence of a basic requirement and tendency founded upon genetics for humans to connect with nature and life.
The majority of families accessing care at Kids on Mullum live in the Maroondah region and children were brought up around local parks, playgrounds and bush reserves around the community.
Within each child’s daily experiences, as they gain insights of their surroundings, a natural space with appropriate challenges and exposure to the boundaries of risk-taking behaviour, such as stick play, climbing, running in open spaces (trip hazards) or engaging with small animals, are crucial for their life-long learning competencies and wellbeing.
The development in these areas can be greatly increased with exposure to nature play.
How the program works at KOM
The bush kinder program runs weekly since Term 3, 2025. With the supervision ratio of 1:11 with two educators (Kinder Teacher and Kinder Educator), and an additional staff (Centre Director, Assistant Director or Educational Leader). They will attend each session with a maximum group of 22 children. All children who attend this bush kinder program require a guardian signed incursion consent form and will be filed and reviewed as required.
The 4-year-old kinder teacher will embed a monthly teaching plan for the bush kinder context and add into the kinder room programs, children’s learning continuity between natural and constructed settings will be emphasised and supported through diverse inquiry-based projects, group discussions, hands-on experiences and open-ended activities. Along with the implementation of the bush kinder program, we promote families’ inputs and regard their feedback as a significant contribution towards our centre policies and QIP.
Families are welcomed to join any of our kinder bush sessions as volunteers and offer help in terms of sharing insects/birds/plants/Aboriginal knowledge.
