Putting the ‘care’ into Dunedin’s early childhood education

Early Childhood on Stafford has established a strong reputation for providing high quality, professional early childhood education and care to Dunedin’s youngest citizens. Our premises centre offers a natural garden setting in the heart of Dunedin’s city hill area at 89 Stafford Street. We believe early childhood education starts with a warm, welcoming and safe environment for your child, and we encourage all our parents/whānau to take an active interest in their development.

Our facilities provide a good mixture of indoor and outdoor activities and equipment to encourage active play, with plenty of room to run around outside. Suppose you are considering early childhood education and care. In that case, you are invited to come and visit us at our early childcare centre at 89 Stafford Street to meet our qualified ECE staff before enrolling your child.

Our child care centre philosophy

We at Early Childhood on Stafford have developed a Philosophy that encompasses how we support, encourage and inspire our children and framed it using the letters of our name (ECOS).

E = Extend your superheroes in environments which excite and empower

We believe that our children are all ‘superheroes’ – in one way or another and that all have super talents that we want to unleash. The ‘excite’ and ‘empower’ statements come from our desire for our educational programme to be exciting and interesting and hence grabbing children’s interests. The “empower” is about all of us, and that by having a fun and “exciting” environment, we will grow learners – whether they be children or adults.

C = Creative minds who have the courage to think outside the ‘triangle’ as they are challenged to reach ‘infinity and beyond’

The ‘Creative minds’ reference comes from our love of the arts. By including this statement, we are saying loud and clear that creativity is important to us. We include ‘courage’ because a large part of our thoughts and actions are about helping our children to be resilient and to take risks to test what they can and cannot do. This takes courage – a ‘have a go’ attitude that we value immensely.

This is also where the reference to “infinity and beyond” sits, in which we are referring to potential. We don’t know what we can do until we try it and often that can lead to places, skills, behaviours and conceptual understandings that we never thought we could get to.

Not only do we value courage, but we also want people to think divergently and perhaps more profoundly, outside the triangle. We want to cultivate an environment of creative thinkers –both children and adults – and one example where you can see this in action is in the new statements; wildly divergent and creative but fun also.

O = Our outside is ‘O’ for awesome

The “O” is about where and how we have fun – yes, we value the outdoor environment and the unlimited use it has for teaching and learning. We don’t only mean our centre’s outside – but also the broader community in which we have regular excursions by both foot and van. We have borrowed from the “O for Awesome” quote, which was mistakenly used in a TV game show quiz (O = orsome) because we believe our outdoors are just that – awesome!

S = Stafford Street knows how to party as it celebrates its community and cultural connections

Our reference to the letter “s” is around our celebrations of celebrations – birthday parties, social events, and community events like Matariki, Easter, Christmas, Polyfest, St Patrick’s Day and Chinese New Year. Families of many cultures also enrich us, and this adds to the collective talent pool of ECOS.

Imbuing lifelong citizen skills and a passion for learning are our mission

It is through this philosophy that we have arrived at our mission statement:

To co-pilot citizens as they embark on a learning journey that will sustain them for life.

It is our mission to support children (and adults) to become good citizens, in partnership with others. As a centre and as individuals, we acknowledge the roles of others in helping support the growth of our children and adults.

The work we do here is linked strongly to the creation of others, and together with support, citizens will grow. Good citizen skills will be lifelong, as will be the passion for learning.