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Welcome to our infant room The Fantail Room sets the beginning foundations to lifelong learning. We greatly value our unique surroundings and often take the opportunity to go for walks around the centre, admiring the beauty of nature and our friendly farm animals.
The Fantail Room has a strong focus on Gerber’s philosophy of respect. We follow elements of a primary caregiver system who is responsible for your child’s wellbeing and their personal routines throughout the day. The Fantail Room encompasses areas of play, including an infant area where infants can safely engage in floor play experiences. Our teachers greatly value the time to simply sit and enjoy special moments alongside their infants. The Fantail Room provides free indoor/outdoor flow through out the day, where we give the children the opportunity to go and explore where they want to. The playgrounds are interchangeable and are age appropriate as well as challenging. Our teaching practice and perspective of children’s learning is driven by our centre philosophy. We aim to provide all children with an environment that is nurturing, respectful, safe, loving and offers a sense of belonging. We understand and value the importance of developing trusting, respectful relationships with infants and toddlers. We value the concepts of free movement with our infants and endeavour to provide adequate time and space for developing movements to happen. We strongly feel that we have the responsibility to support children in their journey towards social competence. Our aim is to provide children the freedom to have fun as they learn. We believe our role is to offer positive guidance and support to develop children holistically. Our programme offers age appropriate planned, spontaneous and teachable moments that stimulate children’s learning. This learning is generated intrinsically as observations have occurred within our team of teachers. These are all based on information, which highlight children’s strengths, abilities and interests. We believe in parents as first teachers and encourage their contribution. Our plan is flexible and we are constantly open to change. We are passionate about allowing time for children to lead the learning. Meal times are a time for social interaction in a relaxed situation. We have an onsite cook who prepares a wide variety of nutritious food. Jill follows a four week menu that was written by a paediatric nutritionist. We have taken part in the Healthy Heart programme where we promote healthy eating and habits. Jill prepares a variety of fresh food daily and filtered water is provided for the children regularly throughout the day. Please advise the centre if your child has any special dietary requirements. The menu is available to view to your own discretion. At Whitford we are also" breast feeding friendly." If you are returning to work and would still like to continue to breast feed, we are happy for you to express milk and bring it in and we will gently warm the milk and feed to your baby. Sleep Our infants are all assigned their own named cot and bedding. Our sleep rooms are temperature controlled and are soothed to sleep with gentle music and back rubs or patting. All children when put to bed are tucked in with their favourite comforter and a teacher settles children to sleep then they are monitored according to our sleep policy. |