Newbies Early Learning School
The first New Zealand preschool's program in Cambodia
Inspired by Newbies Early Learning Centre in Auckland, New Zealand
Using New Zealand’s curriculum, pedagogy and Standard
The Early Year Care & Education
Play-based Curriculum
Programs
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world". Nelson Mandela
Our Program
We offer five developmental programs at Newbies. All programs are based on the assumption that children learn through play, especially when activities are self-initiated and self-regulated. The program is guided and informed by academic research at the Early Childhood Care Center of the University of Auckland (New Zealand), Newbies Early Learning Centre of Auckland City (New Zealand), and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (Cambodia). Teachers encourage children to make choices, to act on those choices and to reflect on the consequences of their activities.
Serving children of all abilities from 3 months to 8 years, we offer:
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a care, love, relationship, attachment, responsive and education program (3 months to 2 years)
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a play-based learning, New Zealand's curriculum and pedagogy (3 years to kindergarten)
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an English-based instruction ( use Khmer as additional language)
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an hourly care, part-time and full-day options
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extended day childcare and play for working parents
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Saturday & Sunday care and education for business parents
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a vibrant summer program (up to age 8)
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optional enrichment classes during the school year, featuring art, music and athletics
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age-appropriate in-center and out-of-center field trips
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free consultation for special education children and needed help children
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free consultation about child growth and development for newly formed families or parents
Infant Program (0-12 months)
Your baby is unique, very precious and deserving of early childhood care, development and education that is respectful and closely aligned with how you care for them at home. Baby care is not the same as caring for toddlers or preschoolers because the needs of this age group are quite different. Babies need regular, gentle moments of care, throughout the day, that are responsive to their world, and that establish strong connections, trust and loving relationships.
You’ll find our teachers are emotionally present and in tune with your baby and so provide care that is based on noticing your little one, recognising what they are doing and what is happening in their day, and responding quickly and with consideration. At this young age, your baby will be in the care of teachers who understand the critical role movement plays in brain development – that’s because all learning begins with the body, and is linked to movement. As your baby’s body is moving, it’s teaching the brain and movement is becoming more automated so your child’s mind is free to think and learn. The more your child moves, the more your child knows.
Our infant care and education program:
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Values our partnership with parents, to personalise your baby’s care and routines so your baby benefits when you are involved and we provide individualised care.
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Provides regular, uninterrupted and unhurried time for your baby to explore and learn. This reduces stress on children and that benefits their social, emotional and brain development.
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Pays attention to your infant to get to know and understand your baby so we’re able to share in their delight at the endless discoveries of the world around them. Your child will feel cherished and you’ll sense how much your child is cared for and loved. Developing this close relationship with your baby takes time, but it’s worth it because he/she will then settle, trust us and feel secure in our care.
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Incorporates a rich blend of sensory interactions, because in your baby’s world, this is how they’re learning. So the more freedom and time they have to safely move and explore, the more creative the environment, the more they’re learning. The floor is your child’s experimental lab for learning – so we provide experiences, natural resources, spaces and opportunities for your infant to touch, manipulate, listen and to observe.
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Develops one-to-one connections – this is achieved by the teacher’s body language and gestures that take their cue from your little one. Through eye contact, laughter, rocking, talking and having fun, your baby is not only bonding with their teachers, he/she is also developing their emerging communication skills.
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Creates calm, predictable environments where your infant is given choices and experiences the security of familiar routines, lots of tenderness and cuddles and smooth transitions throughout their day.
Infant-Toddler Program (12-24 months)
The infant-toddler program facilitates infants’ natural intellectual development and is designed to be an extension of the family unit. Our teachers in this room focus on creating a calm and caring environment to minimise the stress of separation from the family. We do this is by building a key relationship with each child so they have a familiar adult around them who they build a relationship with. We set up a range of daily toys to give the children choice but without overwhelming or over stimulating the play environments.
We believe in allowing children to unfold naturally and don’t use equipment to extend their physical development. This means we don’t have any of the usual ‘equipment’, just open floor space and plenty of exciting equipment to allow children the freedom to make discoveries.
During daily learning/ play periods, infant-toddlers can move freely from indoor and outdoor activities such as:
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Finger and easel painting
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Singing before meals and dramatic play
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Reading and creating stories with flannel board characters
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Puppet play to encourage language expression
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Outdoor play with sensory materials like sand, water, bubbles, and play dough or climbing and taking nature walks
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Problem solving using puzzles, building blocks, and other small motor activities
Toddlers Program (24-36 months)
Your affectionate, inquisitive, busy toddler is on a journey to explore their world, so they need an early childhood care and education program that encourages their natural curiosity, provides the space and resources for them to explore independently and which recognises and supports their social, emotional and developmental needs.
Your toddler, while growing and changing quickly, is still little. That's why it is important that they are supported and guided in building self-confidence, forming new attachments and friendships and encouraged to take on new challenges that enable them to develop the capacity to foresee consequences. In an environment where your little one is able to be creative and make “mistakes”, he/she benefits because they’re learning – they’re constructing meaning, competency and understanding through direct experiences.
This room is focused on competence and readiness while socialisation is a big focus for this age group as they learn how to contribute in a larger group. Each child has a ‘key teacher’ who coordinates the child’s day as many still have a sleep and we start to introduce group learning times as well as the all-day access to creative materials that children are trusted to use whenever they feel like.
Our outdoor area for physical play is fully covered to deal with the Warm and dry weather when it is at its worst! Toddlerhood is a time of huge growth and maturing, which is why we work with the children to provide challenging and ever changing experiences to inspire their developing minds.
The daily schedule in our toddler program includes a choice of activities in a number of different locations:
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Several indoor and outdoor work areas are available with a range of teacher-prepared activities and games to stimulate small muscle coordination and development of cognitive processes, language, mathematics, reading and writing skills. These include puzzles, clay, cutting and gluing tasks and scientific experiments. These work areas facilitate conversations on a range of topics between the children and teachers.
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A creative play area encourages dramatic play with clothes and equipment to create different settings within a home, a store or other settings.
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A block-building area with animals and vehicles helps children think about ways of constructing their own settings and experimenting with inclines and wheels.
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Students have ready access to drawing and collage materials so that they can express themselves in artistic ways.
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Circle time provides an opportunity for movement and music and experiencing cultural diversity through songs and rhyme.
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A reading corner provides a quiet place for individual children or small, adult-led groups to interact with books and ideas. It serves as the location of many quiet discussions on topics like how to handle feelings, what jobs children would like to have as adults or how animals act.
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An active outdoor area contains equipment for large muscle development and motor coordination. There is also working space for sensory materials like sand, water, clay or paints and construction materials like wood, blocks and cardboard. The toddler program takes full advantage of the mild climate, moving many traditional indoor activities outdoors–often resulting in interesting variations.
Kiwi 1 & 2 (3-5 Years)
This room helps supports children to cope with formal learning experiences that they will encounter when they go on to primary school. We do this with ‘focus time’ learning sessions where teachers plan experiences to extend on a child’s interests and encourage new interests. Children of this age love getting out into the community and these experiences inspire children’s thinking and expands their knowledge.
Teachers usually talk with one or a few children at a time and extend each child’s experience with a positive response, question, suggestion or explanation. Emphasis is placed on understanding the image a child has of self and helping the child develop a positive self-image.
The program curriculum is designed to provide for the many areas of growth in young children and includes these types of activities:
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Pre-writing and writing projects: Children use scissors, paste, and a variety of writing and printing tools – including computers – to create books, labels, stories, captions, poems, signs and banners. These activities focus on fine motor control, eye/hand coordination and visual discrimination. Children develop an understanding and appreciation of early literacy skills.
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Listening center tasks: Children listen to stories read to them by adults, participate in flannel board stories, and listen to recorded materials. They develop skills in verbal expression, listening, comprehension, vocabulary and auditory discrimination of words and rhymes.
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Sensory experiences: Children have the opportunity to manipulate, mix, measure and experiment with a range of sensory materials, including clay, sand, flour, mud, salt and water. Cooking experiences help students understand the need for following directions, and making materials like play dough provides wonderful opportunities for innovative experimentation with materials. As children watch the transformation of materials as they are mixed, heated or cooled, they develop important observational and conceptual skills.
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Creative expression: Children have access to a rich variety of media for artistic expression. In addition to teacher-prepared art experiences, a child may select materials for self-directed projects in painting, printing and drawing. These activities develop the child’s fine motor skills using a variety of media that include threading, gluing and 3-D construction.
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Dramatic play: The dramatic play area provides children with props to explore various roles, relationships and interactive strategies through imaginative play. The area undergoes frequent changes–becoming a fire station, a pediatrician’s office, a restaurant, an office or an airliner–as children use their own actions to understand their world.
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Cognitive tasks: Each day different types of puzzles, memory games, measurement tools, cubes, scales and other manipulative materials are set up for the children to explore. These tasks are designed to help children develop their concepts of size, position, color, shape, time, quantity and comparison. Adults are available to help children learn from their observations and to challenge them to use material in new ways.
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Science experiments: Children participate in activities, such as sprouting seeds, growing plants, examining materials with magnification and microscopes, examining and building simple machines and experimenting with wheels and inclines. These tasks promote basic thinking skills and understanding of cause and effect relationships, sequence and predictions. Children’s curiosity about their physical world provides the direction for construction of these tasks.
In addition to these learning centers that change daily, a number of areas are always available to children, including a computer center, a block-building area, a dramatic play corner, a library area and shelves of art materials.
The large group meeting time at noon and a smaller meeting at the end of the day are dedicated to singing, rhyming and language development games that focus on the child’s importance as a member of the group. They provide a setting for children to learn to speak and listen to each other.
Kiwi 3 or Kindergarten (5-6 Years)
Your kindergarten child is full of energy for life, learning and a delightful eagerness to discover their own abilities. At this age, their enquiring minds and hunger for new experiences and concepts makes it so important that you choose childcare where your child’s development and education is fun-filled, offers choices and is based on learning through play.
Our experienced team recognise that your little one is at an age of self-expression, so providing a creative, respectful, imaginative, positive environment, will support them in developing their own identity, and confidence in their ability to lead and make themselves heard. You’ll discover a loving, familiar environment where interactions are affectionate and intentional, where your child is noticed, recognised regularly throughout the day and responded to individually.
As an important member of our kindergarteners, your child will be well prepared for their transition to school, and gain daily benefit from:
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An early childhood environment that encourages them to develop a perception of themselves as capable explorers, who are able to make discoveries, learn about the world and themselves and ultimately, become life-long learners.
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Opportunities and a flexible environment in which your preschooler feels respected and that what he/she has to say matters. This is beneficial in supporting them to develop a positive attitude towards learning and communication, and gives them the confidence to present their ideas and experiences through their play.
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Incorporating real life learning experiences for older preschoolers by going on excursions to extend their research and enquiry-based learning about the current classroom focus. Your child will be lovingly encouraged to e.g. participate at mat time which may involve activities such as recalling events, re-telling a story and sharing his/her opinion. This is so important for their sense of self-worth and growing self-esteem.
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A wide range of early education opportunities for your preschooler to participate in project work, and to develop their investigative and research skills. Your child will be introduced to a range of strategies to explore, be encouraged to try something new, take risks, make mistakes, learn through trial and error, ask questions, make predictions and gain an understanding of how ideas can be expressed in symbols, language and pictures. Their individual interests will be encouraged, and as this grows, so does his/her curiosity and the benefit to your little one is that they seek more information and this extends their knowledge of the world.
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Early care and education that recognises the importance of social and emotional development in the preschool years and helping your child develop fundamental skills for life. These include emotional resilience; building relationships; being self-aware and socially aware; being able to express emotions and feelings appropriately and the security of knowing that their feelings are real.
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Affectionate, loving close relationships that are based on trust, the joy in having fun together, and a real knowledge and understanding of your child.
Operation Hours/After Hours
Our service operates:
Monday-Friday, 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. year round, excluding public holidays.
Saturday-Sunday, 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. year round, excluding public holidays.
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An after-hours program is offered weekdays, 5:30-7 p.m. The after-hours program is available to a limited number of children whose parents cannot pick them up before 5:30 p.m. Only children age 18 months and older are eligible.
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After-hours care is provided between 5:30-7 p.m.
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After-hours fee per child: $5/hour
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Parents who do not pick up their children by 5:30 p.m. will be fined $2 for every 15-minute increment past 5:30 p.m.
In the rare event the after-hours program will be closed, parents will receive at least one week notice. On those days, parents who do not pick up their children by 6 p.m. will be fined $10 for every 15-minute increment past 6 p.m.