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Video transcript
Jo McCulloch
eKindy Head of Department
Planning in kindergarten is critical. We need to offer children multiple opportunities through the year to have learning and development in each of the five areas of the curriculum. So the QKLG offers us really, deep information about learning and development and we need to ensure that the children don't just get one go at the start of the year, but that there is a balance across the year and that there are multiple opportunities to show their learning and development in each area.
In eKindy we have a year overview, and we've got multiple opportunities, frequently throughout the year for children to show us their development in the significant learnings across the five areas.
We have organised the year into eight units, and those units are very open ended, you know, ‘My home - My Kindy’, ‘Let's create’, ‘My family - My friends’. They are things that that, cover any kindergarten situation anywhere but they work for us because we do provide families with resources, to do activities between web sessions. So the long term planning, the year overview is our point of truth and then each unit, is broken into really significant focus areas, and we make sure that we're really monitoring the, significant learnings we've identified there but we often see additional, progress in other areas as well.
Our unit plans are the medium-term planning, and each unit is broken into focussed significant learnings and then there are other significant learnings we're likely to see.
Then we get to the short-term planning, which is the week by week out of the unit and we follow, you know, the children's interests and the children's development as to what we're going to offer that week.
Our, yearly overview gives us the perspective of having covered everything multiple times across different units. But our unit overview gives us the perspective from the practices that we're implementing, which significant learnings are really critical for that unit, which ones we touch on but also the significant learnings that the feedback from parents will inform us on as well.
So our units identify weekly focuses and that's reflected in the materials that families have. So when we're looking at the short term we're taking into account the learning progress and next steps for children and we're also identifying what we might support that the children's interests are around for each week's focus.
So the short term planning is very much identifying, where the learning and development progress for each child is following their interests, but also being, quick to pivot should the interests change and, and conversations go elsewhere. So sometimes we are pivoting and sometimes we are seeing, you know, learning and development that is across the board, not necessarily just that week's focus. We take screenshots, we do recordings of web sessions that help us to keep track of the children's learning and development, and it's enhanced by the feedback that the parents give us, or the home tutors, from the feedback sheets that they are reflecting on, the photos they send us of what they've been up to that week in the comments that they're making. So we know that the children are taking their next steps and what next week might look like.
- Last updated:
- 31 October 2025
