Sustainability and connecting children with the natural world is an important part of early childhood education. We engage our children in discussions about the environment, how natural systems function and how our survival and well being is connected with this. We embed sustainable practices into our program in many ways:

• Creating natural inside/outside environments to explore
• Providing natural materials in play
• Chicken hatching and caring program which helps reduce our waste. Children get to see the full lifecycle of a chicken and each learning group has a designated ‘chook day’ of the week that they look forward to – they love feeding, patting and caring for our chickens
• Worm farm which benefits our plants
• Composting – the children love putting their food scraps, paper towel, dead leaves and more in there
• Planting and gardening
• Vegetable and herb gardens
• Recycling strategies
• Energy saving – in the afternoons you will notice we dim our lighting and turn off air conditioning to reduce power usage
• Discussions around environmental issues

We welcome family input into our sustainability program. If you have any further suggestions or ideas to help us in this area that would be wonderful.

Linked with our sustainability program, we also regularly discuss healthy eating and making good food choices with our children.