Tyabb Village Children’s Centre has grown from the adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Since owners Lavinia and Richard Panelli opened the doors seven years ago to their progressive long day care centre and kinder, demand has grown significantly for places
In a bid to meet the demand, the Panellis have come up with an exciting solution. “We’ve bought a piece of land within walking distance from the centre and we have plans to build a kinder farm,” Lavinia says. “We will offer a three-year-old and four-year-old kinder program at the farm and deliver an Environmental Kinship curriculum. Environmental Kinship shows children how to give to Country and Country to give back to them, so there’s a cycle of giving and receiving always replenishing the land. Willum Warrain Aboriginal Association at Hastings, in partnership with Lionel Lauch from Living Culture, will propagate plants for the kinder farm. We want to have the right kinds of indigenous plants growing to heal the land on the farm.”
In 2020, Tyabb Village Children’s Centre adopted the Possum Skin Pedagogy as its learning framework. Written by Yorta Yorta woman Dr Sue Atkinson, the framework supports early childhood educators in Victoria to embed First Peoples’ perspectives into their programs. “The Possum Skin Pedagogy has been super-successful for us,” Lavinia says. “We teach children on the basis of respect for themselves, respect for others and respect for their country. We teach them to connect to themselves, know themselves, connect to their friends and make a connection to Country.”
The children are taken on outings most days to explore the surrounding area. “If we want future generations to have respect for their communities and continue to build healthy, strong families within beautiful, connected communities, they have to understand what a community is. So our programs are as much outside our four walls as they are within them.”
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