Quality Early
Childhood Education
in Lake Cathie

Our Wombats Room provides a learning environment specifically designed for our youngest age group – 6 months to 2 years. The Wombats Room is spacious in its design and offers and indoor and outdoor space, three different sleeping zones to support the needs of children, as well as stimulating play and learning areas.

In the Wombats Room, we focus on providing secure and loving relationships between educators and children to foster every child's confidence and potential to explore, learn and develop. We believe in the importance of building trusting and supportive relationships with families as their children first enter the early childhood environment.

Routines are an important part of a baby's day and our daily routine will reflect each child's development, individual needs and interests and value the importance of maintaining your baby’s routine from home while they attend our centre. Providing flexibility for activities such as feeding, sleeping, group experiences and exploration, we work closely with families to ensure consistency between their development here and life at home.

Through regular observations of children and communication with families, The Wombat educators develop their knowledge of each child's strengths, needs and interests, which forms the basis of our room’s program. The program is then used to plan and provide stimulating and appropriate experiences that will foster all areas of your child’s development, as well as giving babies the time and the space to explore the world around them. The experiences that we provide in the Wombats Room evolve from children's current and emerging interests, from both the centre and the home environment. These experiences promote exploration and learning through play and offer opportunities for developing a variety of skills. As well as incorporating books, props and technology to support children’s learning, we use both the indoor and outdoor environment, providing natural materials for many experiences.

Between the age of six months and two years, physical development occurs quite rapidly, from sitting, crawling and walking to climbing. We aim to support this development of skills and milestones - understanding each child’s individual ways and time frame for acquiring them. As children gain more independence, they are intent on discovering new things about their environment as well as themselves. They begin to walk and talk, they are learning to listen and are beginning to form friendships with their peers. As educators, we recognise the importance of guiding children and role modelling how to build caring and respectful relationships with others.