Kia ora and Welcome

 

Halswell Learning Tree is a family owned and operated early childhood centre. Located in Halswell, Christchurch, we aim to provide the highest level of quality early childhood education and care. Halswell Learning Tree caters for children from 0 to 6 years of age in a nurturing and stimulating learning environment.

 

Halswell Learning Tree is open Monday - Friday from 7.30am to 5.30pm.
We run a full day session (7.30am - 5.30pm), a morning session (7.30am - 12.30pm), an afternoon session (12.30pm - 5.30pm), and a half day session (9.00am - 3.00pm).

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Our Mission

 

At Halswell Learning Tree, we aim to provide a safe, nurturing, educational environment that celebrates and embraces diversity. We provide a well-resourced environment that lays the foundation to support each child's social, emotional, physical, cognitive, intellectual, and creative development.

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Our Vision

 

Our vision is to create a 'home away from home' environment where children are at the centre of everything we do. Our safe and loving environment encourages children to explore and discover the world around them. We value the importance the role of play has on children's learning and development.

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We want to be recognised by our community as providing trusting, affordable, and high quality care and education for our children. Our environment will foster and support the individual potential and well-being of each child. We aim to provide experiences to encourage children to develop and understanding of kaitiakitanga as we support them to value, respect, and care for the environment.

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We will provide an environment that is calm, inviting, respectful, inclusive, safe, and promotes learning and development. Our dedicated and passionate teaching team role model loving relationships, work collaboratively with children and their whānau, build on children's interests, and support children to be confident and competent learners.

 

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Our Philosophy

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At Halswell Learning Tree, we believe in providing our children with a fun, safe, and loving environment in which they feel safe and secure. All of our children make up our family here, and we aim to provide a safe, clean, and nurturing environment in which they feel a sense of belonging. Our children are given the respect of an individual and we work in partnership with them as we engage in reciprocal partnerships between the teachers and children.

 

We believe in providing children with an environment that encourages them to be life-long learners. As we value the importance of play, we provide an environment that helps children build a love of learning and make their own choices through free-play. We also value building children’s listening skills, attention skills and sustained concentration through our mat times and quiet times. Our teachers continue to build their professional knowledge and are positive role models to the children as they support them in their interactions with others. We encourage children to explore while providing them limits and boundaries to develop an awareness of acceptable behaviour.

 

Relationships are extremely important to us and our team understands the importance of relationships being based on respect. Our relationships with each other, our children and our whanau are one of our most important values. We believe in having a teaching team that has great communication with each other to help them work effectively and enhance the learning of our children.

Nursery Philosophy

 

In our nursery, we recognise the important role that relationships play in these early years. We believe that trusting relationships form the foundation for our children to grow and learn. Our teachers spend time developing positive and trusting bonds with our children, so they know that their needs will be met. We value primary caregiving in our nursery environment and we believe this helps our children to build strong attachments with our teachers and will support the future relationships of our children. We have open, honest and consistent communication with whānau to ensure continuity of care for our tamariki. Our environment is nurturing and loving, and includes positive attention, love and friendships. We encourage our children to make choices and support and guide them as needed. We provide experiences that are planned for the individual child to extend on their learning and development and we work in partnership with families as we create learning goals for our children.

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Preschool Philosophy

 

In our preschool room, we believe in providing our children with an environment in which they feel a sense of belonging and confidence to explore and learn about the world around them. We support our children to develop ako relationships in our environment and this involves our older children and younger children learning from and supporting each other. Our children from the nursery and preschool have a lot of interactions with each other, as we believe this contributes towards this and also promotes experiences to develop empathy and a caring nature. We believe in fostering important values for our children in the early years. This includes the provision of an environment that values aroha, respect, and trust. We value the bicultural heritage of Aotearoa and believe this should be respected alongside the languages and cultures of those in our centre family. Our teaching team work to create an environment which values the cultures of our children, teachers, and families, and incorporate this into our curriculum plan. We work in partnership with families as we create individual learning goals for our children. We believe in giving our children a sense of responsibility and encouraging them to take responsibility for themselves and others. We encourage all of our children to build independence with the vision of them transitioning from our centre as competent, confident learners.