Moving up to preschool is a big milestone! At our centre, we celebrate each child’s journey with love, support, and strong connections — honouring language, culture, identity, and whānau every step of the way. 💛
In our centre, we love to acknowledge and celebrate special occasions and events. The journey from nursery to preschool is a big milestone, not only for our wonderful tamariki, but for our extended whānau too.
As our ākonga move into the preschool, we embrace manaakitanga, whanaungatanga, and ako, fostering an environment and transition process where each child feels respected, valued, and empowered to take on this change.
Our transition visits take time and are based on each individual child and their readiness. It is guided by visits, observations, and relationships, and is in partnership with our parents and whānau. This can be a big learning curve for our toddlers — who were once the big fish — now becoming the younger teina again.
Relationships are key, which is why we value our key kaiako approach throughout the centre. We ensure each child has someone special they can go to for support and reassurance if needed. As each child is unique, we strongly encourage our whānau to be involved as much as possible to strengthen this process so that we can best support each child.
Language, culture, and identity are very important. We ensure we acknowledge family customs, cultural routines, and home languages through stories, conversations, and photos. This, in turn, creates a sense of belonging within the new space and encourages our learners to thrive because we know who they are as individual people.
Our most recent transitioners, Kobe and Elvin, have strong cultural backgrounds and these have been acknowledged and extended upon during these transition times too.
Elvin is Chinese and his whānau speak Mandarin. We have been ensuring we speak to Elvin’s whānau clearly about this process, show photos of his new space, and have our wonderful kaiako Abby translate information that may be more difficult to understand.
Kobe is Sāmoan and we acknowledge his culture in this transition process by sharing with whānau what each day looks like, learning how Kobe’s Sāmoan culture is reflected in and spoken at home, and including his special ula fala in his graduation photo (as seen in his photo).