Elements and Performance Criteria
- Elements define the essential outcomes.
- Foster physical development
- Assess and monitor children’s physical skills and development
- Plan and provide appropriate experiences and opportunities to foster each child’s fine and gross motor skills, and fundamental movement skills through play
- Plan and provide experiences which challenge the physical skills and abilities of children and promote physical fitness
- Foster social development
- Assess and monitor children’s social skills and development
- Plan and provide opportunities for different forms of social interaction between children during play with respect for each child’s interests, goals and development stage
- Create opportunities for children to participate in meaningful ways in group discussions and shared decision-making
- Structure experiences in a way that promotes cooperation and conflict resolution
- Promote a sense of community within the service
- Arrange the environment to encourage interactions between children as well as accommodating a child’s need for privacy, solitude or quiet
- Provide opportunities for children to investigate ethical issues relevant to their lives and their communities
- Foster emotional development
- Assess and monitor children’s emotional development
- Create opportunities for children to experience individual strengths and successes during play
- Plan and provide opportunities through play that challenge children’s emerging skills and capabilities
- Provide opportunities for children to engage independently with tasks
- Create opportunities for children to explore self-image and identity through play
- Provide opportunities for children to release feelings and express emotions through suitable experiences
- Foster cognitive development
- Assess and monitor children’s cognitive skills and development
- Engineer and provide opportunities for children to participate in science, mathematics and technology experiences
- Plan and provide opportunities through play for children to experience the consequences of their choices, actions and ideas
- Create learning environments with appropriate levels of challenge where children are encouraged to explore, experiment and take appropriate risks in their learning
- Build opportunities for involvement in experiences that support the investigation of ideas, complex concepts and thinking, reasoning and hypothesising
- Provide opportunities through play for children to explore concept development
- Make opportunities for children to both construct and take apart, as a strategy for learning
- Provide children with a wide range of everyday materials that they can use to create patterns and to sort, categorise, order and compare
- Foster communication development
- Assess and monitor children’s language skills and development
- Plan and provide developmentally appropriate experiences and opportunities to foster language and literacy development through play
- Create opportunities for children to listen and respond to language
- Value the child’s linguistic heritage and encourage the use and acquisition of home languages
- Provide opportunities for children to engage with familiar and unfamiliar culturally constructed text
- Create a literacy-enriched environment including displaying home languages and Standard Australian English
- Provide resources that encourage children to experiment with images and print
- Foster an environment for holistic learning and development
- Support and initiate inquiry processes, try new ideas and take on challenges
- Provide resources and materials that offer challenge, intrigue and surprise
- Assist to promote children’s sense of belonging and connectedness
- Engage children in sustained shared conversations to extend their thinking
- Provide the opportunity for scaffolding learning and development
- Assist children to see their mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow
- Facilitate families’ diverse contributions to the learning community
- Share information with colleagues about child development and wellbeing
- Create learning environments where children are able to immerse themselves in self-directed play
- Recognise spontaneous teachable moments as they occur and use them to build on children’s learning
- Ensure a balance between child-initiated and educator- supported learning
- Provide learning environments with appropriate levels of challenge where children are encouraged to explore, experiment and take risks in their learning
- Facilitate team collaboration of assessments and evaluation in relation to child development and wellbeing