At Totom House, under the direction of qualified, experienced and empathetic educators implementing a flexible curriculum, which responds to children’s interests, strengths, ideas, culture and abilities, children develop physically, socially, grow in confidence and develop warm relationships with each other and their educators. The environment consists of a range of resources which foster children’s creativity and encourages them to express themselves both orally and through all types of different media, particularly indoor and outdoor play, painting, constructing, drawing, nature-based activities, movement and through interaction with other people of different abilities, dispositions, age, development and cultural background.
Our teaching-learning program is developed following the guidelines of the national Early Years Learning framework. Educators monitor each child’s development and skill-level and make the appropriate adjustments to the curriculum to ensure each child is continuously supported in the learning process. Each year the children are in our care, they engage in different projects, all of which aim to teach them important life skills and to help them become contributing members to our society. Examples of these projects are ‘being kind to others’ ‘respecting the environment’, ‘how to self-regulate’, ‘persist in trying’, ‘looking after your own hygiene and health’ and the like.
We pride ourselves on our accessible and inclusive approach to providing a high standard of care. We welcome children of any cultural family background, and/or belonging to any family structure or belonging to families who identify as LGBTQ. As the official name of our centre indicates, we actively promote Australia’s multicultural society and increase the children’s knowledge of various cultures through the children’s participation in a range of cultural practices of various ethnic groups. We draw on local resources to include indigenous perspectives in our curriculum. Furthermore, we employ qualified educators from a range of cultural backgrounds and family structures, and strongly encourage the parents and friends of the children, many of which belong to families from culturally- and linguistically-diverse backgrounds and family structures, to bring their experiences, songs, cuisine, stories and activities into the centre – an approach which has proved to be very successful in broadening each child’s knowledge and experience.
As a non-profit, community-based centre, we value, and rely on, family and local community involvement, which not only enables us to offer a wide range of learning opportunities and resources to the children but also to keep our fees at the lowest possible.</span>
If you wish your child to build warm and caring relationships with educators and other children, learn important life-skills, engage in interesting, appropriately-challenging endeavours, experience a variety of diverse cultural activities, have lots of fun and be ready for ‘big’ school, Totom House is a place for your child. Pop in and see for yourself at any time. We are a very welcoming community.
Hiro Barua
Director