Children are naturally curious. Through play, children are given opportunity to wonder, explore, hypothesise, and discover. This can be evident in both individual and collaborative group play experiences. As part of stimulating a child’s natural desire to play, we give children the opportunity to role-play and explore their personality through different situations and challenges. It is through play in these roles that children learn and grow. At learn and Laugh Drummoyne we believe play is essential to children’s growth, happiness and development. Play is joyful, exciting, spontaneous, hands on, stimulating, relaxing, confronting and challenging. We understand that through this play children learn best and they use many languages to help shape and make visible their understanding.

Within our senior room we connect children to the world around them through play and extending upon their voices. We value the importance of social interactions and listening to our children’s ideas to make this contribution and to share learning experiences. Learning to respect the perspectives of others build friendships and increases an understanding of the world we live in and our sense of belonging to our community.

Children created the solar system AND a creation of our very own astronaut.

An example of our learning and following the children’s voices is our project on space. It begun from a child’s question, “where is space?” we then brainstormed what we already knew about space, travelling to and through space and learning about all the individual planets. Although the question originated on space children’s voices then lead us to stars, the effects of light pollution and what it does to how we view our night sky. From here, we begun talking about light pollution, what stars actually look like, the life cycle and size of stars all the way down to what happens when they get too big and powerful and make black holes! From our learning on black holes our senior children were amazed that something bigger than our entire universe is out there sucking in and ‘eating’ galaxies and nothing can stop it. AND then another question “but how does it suck in all these planets, stars, moons, galaxies and even other black holes?” GRAVITY!  Our learning has been endless following and extending on our children’s voices.

Exploring Gravity