Innovation and compassion driving early childhood services response to lockdown

Early childhood education and care services continue to operate during the COVID-19 outbreak, unless closed for public health reasons, but with large numbers of families choosing to keep their youngsters home, many services are taking an innovative and amazingly nimble approach to staying connected with families and keeping children engaged in their learning while they are home.   

Services both large and small have responded quickly and positively to the changed conditions and have started offering a range of resources to educate parents about COVID-19 and support them to educate and care for their children at home.

The wonderful thing about these offerings is that many of them are being made available to all families, not just those who are enrolled with a specific service, which increases the opportunities for all children at home to access high quality play based learning experiences.  

We are delighted to highlight some of these initiatives below, and would ask you to please drop us a line (editor@careforkids.com.au) if your service has implemented an innovative way of delivering education initiatives to parents caring for their children at home. 

Guardian’s Learning Exchange is a vast repository of fun activities for preschool aged children, which has been developed and curated by Guardian teachers and educators to help children and families stay connected and have fun. Children can choose from a range of play based learning experiences, which offer parents simple, cost effective ways to keep children engaged in their learning.  

To help children and families make sense of the Coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes, Kids Club have produced a wonderful animation, which is voiced by a child and explains how the virus is spread and what children can do to keep themselves safe.

Kids Club have also produced a survival guide for parents which includes stacks of activity ideas, learning resources and ways to keep children happily occupied.     

Goodstart Early Learning have launched Goodstart@Home, which is freely available to currently enrolled Goodstart families and available to other families upon registration. Goodstart@Home was developed by a team of early education experts and focuses on providing simple play-based learning activities for preschoolers of every age. 

In addition to the above CELA (Community Early Learning Australia) recently showcased Inaburra Preschool, which has introduced a range of interesting initiatives designed to bridge the gap between families and their preschool. These include 15-minute Zoom preschool sessions incorporating songs and stories as well as electronic resource packs for families, offering a range of templates, activity suggestions, music resources, art ideas and more.

A large number of centres which belong to the G8 Education family are involved in a campaign called the Kindness Initiative, which is focused on increasing acts of compassion and connection in the communities where they are located.

Centres are engaged in a wider range of different activities, for example,  Community Kids Golden Square, in the Victorian city of Bendigo, had developed a close bond with residents at a nearby aged care home. While visits are on hold, the children have created colourful and inspiring artworks which have been emailed to the home to help raise the spirits of residents.

At Creative Garden Pakenham in south-east Melbourne, staff delivered a bundle of food and essentials like nappies and wipes to a mum who is single and at home with her three autistic children who have had to self-isolate as they have compromised immune systems. Until the Coronavirus took hold, the three-year-old twins and two-year-old daughter were attending the centre four days per week.

First Grammar in Bankstown  has been busy supporting its community via a range of initiatives including a beautiful rainbow trail, dinner packs and by offering Zoom catch ups once a week with their families.