St Johns Kindergarten is unique, you won’t find anywhere quite like us. We offer children a combination of age-specific technological and nature learning. Our beautiful, large multi-purpose play areas adjoin a reserve which is an extension of our learning environment. With us children have the freedom to explore in their own way, at their own pace as well as participate in structured group projects. Combined with our diverse, multicultural social environment, we offer a rich and varied early childhood experience that’s second to none.

STEAM learning

We are one of the few early childhood centres in the Southern Hemisphere to have built an age-appropriate curriculum around facets of science, technology, engineering, art, and maths (STEAM).

Children explore and experiment using our rich collection of loose mechanical parts and construction materials. They design and build with real carpentry and engineering tools under the guidance of our experienced teachers.

“Let’s Science It,” is our motto as children problem-solve and exerience wonder while conducting chemistry experiments, launching rockets, coding robots and creating green-screen videos and stop-motion animations.

Creating murals, collages, acrylic pours, prints and ceramics happens in our art studio where art is valued as a child’s natural way to think deeply and communicate. Dancing and improvising on our keyboard and rock drum kit, or belting a song over the mic are dynamic daily occurances.

As an Environmental Action Kindergarten, we nurture children’s awareness of being part of nature while we also integrate their assimilation in the digital age, combining technological learning into our experiments with eco gardening and our experiences of other species.

Children’s play in our sandpit, gravel pit and mud ‘swamp’ is extended in a unique direction by our Augmented Reality Sandbox, which projects ever changing contours of rivers, lakes, mountains and volcanos onto the sand piles in response to their little hands as they shift and mould.

Group Projects

Children are given the opportunity to work together with others on indepth projects that may extend over weeks or months. Project work involves many different activities and skills that blend science, maths, engineering and art with literacy learning in a meaningful context.

For instance, observation of insects on a field trip to the park adjoining our kindergarten might be preceded by watching slow-motion and macro videos of insects and followed by sessions drawing and labelling their distinctive body shapes; by painting images, colours, feelings of how they move; by story-dictation; by the construction of insect-like ‘machines’ made from wire and popsicle sticks and metal paper-binder linkages; and by composing insect sound music using transducers and our ethereal sounding Theramin.

Social and Emotional Wellbeing

Learning how to learn is the main educational goal of early childhood, and we take great pride and pleasure in supporting children’s relationships with each other through their imaginative free play and our three organized groups: Pohutakawa (roughly 2-3 year-olds), Rimu (roughly 3-4 year-olds), and Kauri (4-5+ year olds). The activities of the groups vary in length and complexity according to age and the interests that arise within them.

Unlike ‘transition to school’ groups in their final few months of kindy, our groups normalize the routines and emotional demands of social living right through our children’s kindergarten experience. This long-term experience of group life also allows for better documentation of children’s progress. The youngest children’s group experiences additionally facilitate their transition from parallel to social play and enhance their oral language development.