Kindergarten and Playcentre

I'm in New Zealand for a bit with family, so I got to visit a playcentre, which is the main kindergarten model that we're following. It's funny - the two most popular 'alternative' learning styles, Reggio and Montessori both started in slums too. Playcentre is still pretty working class as well.

Two parents working in the East Wanganui Playcentre answered lots of questions patiently and showed me around and passed me some of their teaching materials. Jolene's going to be really pleased - so nice to have a proven worked-out curriculum that we can adapt rather than invent from scratch. It's got a lot of Maori cultural stuff which means we can replace that with Khmer cultural stuff and maybe even some Vietnamese, localising it.

Playcentre is child-led learning - basically, it's loosely structured kindy for kids from 0-6 by having lots of parent volunteers, parent training and quite laid-back. One of my sister's put her kids through playcentre which is how I know about it, and the best thing for us is the strong emphasis on parent involvement.

So far, what we've noticed is that the kids in Grade School are struggling with fine motor control - they're amazing little gymnasts, great balance and so on, but they struggle with pencils and scissors. Plus pretty limited literacy exposure.

Playcentre in NZ has to worry about different things - food hygiene for them is more about healthy snacks and disposable gloves, they're big on outdoor play and their parents want to be there, plus a huge amount of community and government support.

But the same kind of toys - puppets, basic metric blocks, playdough and fingerpainting. The same getting parents to work together, and also thanfully, the same 'how do we get untrained people to being really great child-centered teachers' problem, and lots of really good ideas.

They do this neat thing with folders, the kind where you can slip pages into the plastic leaves? Each child gets a 'public' folder, for their artwork, special events reports (field trips with photos!) and a week's worth of daily write-ups on one page. This is all positive stuff. Anything negative goes into the private folder. So the child has this lovely happy document, a growing scrapbook of them and their progress.

I've promised to email them some photos of our kindergartners when I next see them. Wish I'd taken some of the playcenter so our teachers could see their place!