Sustainability equals creativity at Story House Tarneit

Sustainability is taught in early childhood to enable educators and children to promote a sense of responsibility, show respect for the natural environment, be active participants and bring about enquiry and social change.

Sustainability education is fun, engaging and empowering for children because it allows them to take responsibility for their actions and to contribute their vision for a sustainable future. It enables them to develop knowledge, skills, values and motivations for action, allowing them to maintain their own wellbeing – and that of their community and the planet – in an increasingly interconnected world.

At Story House Early Learning Tarneit, our Sustainability Warrior, Courtney Blodder inspires Educators and children to incorporate sustainability into our classrooms daily with a living wall display in our foyer for all to see.

Our Fortnightly Sustainability Challenges

Each fortnight, Courtney challenges every room with a Sustainability Challenge. Our challenges inspire children to be creative, problem solve, explore a range of media and helps to promote positive social and emotional development.

To help us with these challenges, we encourage families to donate items via our ongoing email communications and then we collect these reusable resources from our donation tubs to use in our classrooms.

We were very fortunate that our families donated a stack of dated newspapers to use for our challenge which has made us become super creative!

Challenge Results

Here are some of the ways we have used our newspapers over the past two weeks:

• Making pot plants by folding newspaper to make the pots and filling them with soil and seedlings.
• Cutting strips of paper to create and decorate paper mache bowls.
• Using our hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills to fold sheets of newspaper into butterflies.
• Using small pieces of torn newspaper to collage letters of the alphabet which helps us learn our letters.
• Using our imaginations to paint colourful pictures on newspaper instead of white paper.
• Using the scissors to cut out shapes from the newspaper to construct pictures.

Your Challenge!

We think we did an amazing job coming up with lots of ways to reuse and recycle newspaper here at Story House Tarneit.

Our next challenge is to incorporate recycled plastic water bottles into our program each day.  Join in the challenge with us to see how many ways you can reuse, reduce or recycle plastic water bottles and share it on our Facebook page.

• If you have any questions in relation to this, please contact our Service Manager, Sara Tai.
• For information regarding our childcare and kindergarten service  go to: Story House Early Learning Tarneit.