At 360 North Ryde, we have a vibrant Creative Arts Program for all ages which culminates in an Annual Art Exhibition. Our families trail throughout the service to celebrate their children’s interests and creative expressions. This year, our theme was inspired by native flora and fauna, and the rich Indigenous heritage that our children discovered on their Beyond the Classroom program. All age groups created works of visual art using raw, natural materials such as gumnuts, dried banksia, eucalyptus leaves, pinecones and tree sticks.
Creative Arts in our Preschool Rooms
Our preschoolers have been contemplating the change in seasons and how this impacts the surrounding fauna and flora. To celebrate their learnings, they collaborated to produce ‘Four Seasons’, a canvas painting using sticks and greenery that they gathered on their nature walk. They also created a beautiful eucalyptus tree in honour of the one that provided them a shady place to sit on their Bush School outing.
Another standout project in our Preschool Rooms was the Butterfly Origami. By using a single, plain piece of paper, the children crafted unique butterflies to symbolise their individual selves. A larger butterfly was constructed to represent 360 Early Education. Their Head Butterfly guides them throughout their preschool journey.
Creative Arts in our Babies Rooms
Creative activities are a wonderful opportunity for babies to engage in sensory processing. Our youngest children engaged their visual senses by painting and drawing to create a ‘Garden of Tiny Hands’. They used their olfactory senses when working with native flora from our local bushland. Their sense of touch was engaged when they played with twigs, wattle petals, pinecones, sticks and seeds. Crafting activities are also a wonderful way for babies to perfect their fine-motor skills; they used their fingers to grasp and manipulate coloured markers, crayons and paint. In particular, our youngest children were enthralled with the storytelling by Ros Moriarty’s Kangaroo Hop and Rod Campbell’s Aussie Animals. These books served as inspiration for their fauna artwork.
Our service was fortunate to be visited by Wandana, an Aboriginal Educational Group that aims to preserve First Nations culture. The group performed a sweeping ceremony with native foilage, played traditional music and painted children’s faces. Aboriginal artworks from our youngest rooms were an extension of this wonderful incursion.
Creative Arts in our Toddler Rooms
Our toddlers are making sense of their identity and the world around them. Visual arts provide an opportunity for children to express their thinking, make sense of their emotions and to explore a diversity of cultures. Our toddler rooms created abstract paintings using native plants and dried banksia. They experimented with collage and created trees and Australian animals by piecing together gathered bark, tree sticks, textured paper and eucalyptus leaves.
At 360 Early Education, we encourage children of all ages to explore their own artistic ideas and interests. We draw upon many educational theorists to produce a curriculum that allows for open-ended, creative activities through play. Early childhood philosophers such as Howard Gardner, Lev Vygotsky, Urie Brofenbrenner, and Jean Piaget, teach us that the visual arts are limitless with opportunities to nurture cognitive development, emotional regulation, creativity and ofcourse – joy!
