Explore & Develop - Macquarie Park

Privately owned and operated, Explore & Develop Macquarie Park will provide a caring, creative, home-like environment that will support the learning and growth of each child that we care for.

Our centre is built to nurture and facilitate the development of all children across our four playrooms. Each playroom offers a program designed to cater for the unique needs of children from 6 week to 6 years of age.

Each room offers a multitude of experiences that will nurture, teach, challenge, and enable your child to absorb and learn from the world around them. We also facilitate calm times where children have space and encouragement to think, reflect and relax.

Our caring committed staff are able to nurture children with higher than required child to staff ratios. This ensures that all children receive the individual care and attention that they deserve. There is always a hand to hold when joining in the fun and an enthusiastic teacher to look to for comfort and direction.

We are focused on providing naturalistic, sustainable outdoor playgrounds. Our play spaces are constructed out of natural materials such as timber for board walks, perfomance platforms and cubbys, as well as boulders and logs to provide gross motor challenges. Our sandpits are naturalistic in design with accompanying water access. Our creek beds and vegetable gardens will also encourage a variety of social and imaginative play experiences.

Native Plants have been selected in the playgrounds for their sensory features such as texture, scented properties, colour and seasonal changes as well as to attract birds and insects. These plantings, used throughout the play spaces, will encourage children to interact with the natural world. Our playgrounds will provide your child with a wealth of sensory experiences through out their time at our centre.

We take great pride in our centre being as sustainable as possible. We are using recycled materials in the internal and external design and build of the centre, rainwater where possible, and will be able to grow our own vegetables in our vegetable garden. We aim to teach our children to respect and care for their environment.

We are thrilled to offer you the opportunity to experience the difference of Explore & Develop Macquarie Park and look forward to meeting you and supporting your family during your time at our centre.

The Geckos (0-2)

The Geckos room offers an exciting, nurturing, homelike environment for children aged from 6 weeks to two years.

Each day our team of dedicated professionals care for up to sixteen children, working collaboratively with families to ensure that babies feel secure and well looked after! Our priority in the Geckos room is ensuring consistency between the babies home life and their time at the centre. Wherever possible, feeding and sleeping routines will be decided with the parents advice. Every morning, staff will take the opportunity to speak with you, together deciding upon the best way that your child’s needs may be met. We understand that babies can be unpredictable - sleepless nights, teething, nappy rash... so we are always flexible.

All meals are provided, we just ask that formula be sent in every morning if necessary. This is to ensure that each child's specific requirements and family preferences, which are so important at this early stage, can be respected. Each child is given a cot in one of our beautiful sleep rooms. Geckos are provided with linen, but are more than welcome to bring safe comforters or dummies if need be. To ensure that sleep times are restful, and that your child feels comfortable and secure sleeping in the room, he or she will use the same cot until they are ready to move onto a bed. Furthermore, staff will stay with your child, if necessary, to comfort them.

The Geckos room is equipped with a state of the art, naturalistic outdoor playscape. This environment offers children a change to explore their world in an authentic way, providing very real opportunities for learning and growth.

Imagination and creativity are highly valued in our room. Music and visual arts experiences are offered regularly, and change with the children's developing interests. We understand that children of this age can be at drastically different developmental stages and we try to accommodate the development of all of these with our weekly program. We work with one teacher to every four children, meaning that your child will always be offered a personalised, nurturing experience inspired by the reciprocal relationship between the baby and their primary carer.

Staff are always working towards extending themselves professionally and are constantly reflecting upon contemporary research in order to ensure the best possible experience for each and every child.

This room, which like the Geckos room caters to sixteen children per day, is staffed by two permanent primary caregivers and one part time support worker.

A typical day in the turtle’s room is full of excitement, opportunities for exploration and discovery. We take an emergent approach to curriculum development, and as such, our program offers a variety of child directed, child inspired and teacher guided opportunities. We value play based learning as an ideal context for young children’s development and this is reflected in our practice. Our curriculum approach takes the whole child into account, focussing on their social, intrapersonal, emotional, physical, cognitive and developmental needs. We believe that children have a right to be appreciated as they are, and not just who they are going to be.

We dedicate a significant amount of time to interest based emergent play in order to inspire children to engage in a truly immersive learning experience. We are attentive to, and really value, the expertise, cultural experience, knowledge and interests of children. A strong emphasis is placed on the ways in which children are able to teach and learn from each other, as well as from their teachers.

We understand that ‘toddlerhood’ is a time rich in transitions – from cot to bed, bottle to cup, nappies to undies – and strive to support families and children as these skills emerge and expand. At Explore and Develop Macquarie Park, we value the input of parents, as it has been shown that feelings of security and confidence can be enhanced with consistency between the home and care setting. We will, with you, develop an ‘action plan’ to make sure that these transitions are managed well, and are enjoyable for, the child.

In the turtle’s room, the children are offered morning tea, a hot lunch, afternoon tea and a small late afternoon snack. Our meals are nutritionally balanced and very satisfying! After lunch, a mid day rest/sleep time is offered to (and usually appreciated by) all children.

At Explore and Develop, we provide the children with a fun, innovative educational program sourced from children's interests. Using an Emergent Curriculum, we support each child's varied developmental needs. We work to extend and expand their existing skill sets whilst designing experiences to support the development of new skills.

In the Frog's room, learning journeys often take the form of extended whole group projects. We brainstorm, discuss, question, research, regroup and synthesise our learning in the form of a display. Projects may run for any length of time - sometimes over months! - depending on the children's level of interest. Literacy, numeracy and thinking skills such as recall and problem solving are integrated into the experiences to make learning both enjoyable, authentic and valuable; with research suggesting that when children discover something for themselves that knowledge is more likely to be sustained.

Our aim is to create a place of wonder, where inspired exploration and discovery are a daily experience!

For detailed information about our pre-school program, see the "Pre-School" page (above).