Exemplary Dominican

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Honouring and empowering our youngest children

Mary Bailey House is the College’s Early Education Centre for babies from six weeks old up to children aged six.

Our Mission is to honour children and empower them to express their voice and rights. We make this possible by acknowledging and valuing the uniqueness of every child and fostering a community of learners within each playroom. In 2021 we readily observed children of all ages discussing and working together to imagine, create, solve and resolve matters important to them in play. During Sydney’s lockdown we had to imagine, create, solve and resolve ways to sustain a community of learners with children learning at home. In Cradle Mountain (six-weeks-old babies to two-year-olds) and Lilly Pilly Gully (two- to three-year-olds) we made this possible by sharing with children at home what the children at the centre had been doing through images and film. We invited the children at home to do the same. We arranged virtual meetings so that friends could connect. These occasions were always full of joy as children smiled, laughed, waved and chatted with one another. We celebrated Book Week with the virtual telling of the story Tiddalik the Frog and Aboriginal Children’s Day through the shared viewing of ABC Play School: Walking Together episode. We acknowledged Father’s Day by creating a film in which children at home and the centre told their dads how much they loved them (with some help from their mums). In Daintree Rainforest (three- to six-year-olds) we provided families with information sheets and links to online experiences for preschoolers learning from home. Parents shared stories and images of their children learning and our teachers and educators reciprocated by posting their daily escapades on the College’s community portal, Veritas Online. We continued to include the children at home in the playroom project on sustainability by inviting them to share their theories through drawing. We conducted literacy sessions online and our focus teachers and educators remained connected with their children, and their children with one another, through email and virtual meetings.

After National Reconciliation Week we created a video about respecting and caring for Mother Earth.

JACKIE BAXTER

Mary Bailey House Director

A fresh new look

for our Primary Years Library

Influential American educator Harold Howe once said, ‘What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education’. Santa Sabina College has two libraries – on each of the Primary Years and Secondary campuses – and in the summer of 2021 our Primary Years Library received a refreshing makeover to reflect its importance in the lives of our youngest students. The upgraded library and enhanced Makerspace support the education and needs of our students. We now have modern, beautiful, flexible spaces and breakout rooms for the students.

We were very excited to open our doors to the students with this fresh new look. When designing the renovations, we wanted our spaces to be student-centred and flexible. We collaborated with the school community and asked students and teachers for input.

As a result, our library is welcoming and attractive, inspiring, comfortable and reader friendly. It can accommodate individual and class-based research activities. It is a space where students can read for pleasure, develop curiosity and find assistance for their learning.

In our Makerspace, students collaborate, communicate, create, think critically and solve problems. In this space they are challenged and yet they can relax and have fun. Students collaborate at desks or work with robotics on the floor.

WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES OF OUR REFURBISHED LIBRARY

‘What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education’.

Top: Collaboration in the revived Makerspace. Bottom: Storytime for Prep with their teacher Clare Wood.