Consultation and Planning

Parent consultation

After checking out possible sites I then worked on some special policies I would need in addition to the service's current policies. They included risk, snakes and first aid specifically at the nature kindergarten site. We then consulted our parent body for potential interest. Initially we had two groups of 10 on a Tuesday and Thursday planned to cater for the attendance of parents that were very interested in our service. Our parent meeting was reasonably well attended and the parents that did attend were very keen on our new program. So based on children and parent interest we decided to go ahead with the trial. I got together a pack for each parent which included all the appropriate policies and the nature kindergarten handbook as well as appropriate permission forms for parents. 

We then commenced our first Nature Kindergarten session at the end of July. We also created an A3 planning book where we had a title page that was educator created then all of the children put their hand prints in the next couple pages to represent the fact that this book was created by them. Across the course of the next 8 weeks which is the length of time we have been running the trial we have used this book with varying degrees of success sometimes it just records our planning for the session and sometimes it is used for reflection.