Remote kindergarten pilot at Muttaburra State School.
This town is just a little country town.
We only have a population of about 50, and to be able to have kids on site, five days a fortnight, was really valuable for this community.
We have a whole group session at the start of the day.
And then I generally will put the Kindies with Kindy Prep One, cause I wanted all the kids to have teacher time, not just the Kindy kids to have teacher aide time.
So, I made it so that I could rotate between all the different grades.
We usually plan our Kindy days together.
And we discuss what the children have enjoyed doing.
We try to sort of implement that into the next week as well.
If they've done paintings or written their names, we take a copy of it, and it's all glued into their book for the parents to be able to look at.
Pick up the kids, they straight away look up and go, "Look what you did today!" or "Look at that picture of you."
It's just documented right from the word go, exactly how far they've come, which is a really long way.
Our Kindy kids, they're well supervised upstairs, and downstairs all of us do playground duty together.
We just make sure that somebody's always got eyes on the orange t-shirts.
Our Kindy kids love being at school with us, and we've got very engaged parents.
[Parent] He tells me a lot what happens at school.
Just the things that they've done, what they're going to do.
He fights with me to come to school.
But most of all, I think it's the integration with the other kids.
They work really well as a team.
The whole school.
For the older kids, I think it's almost like a nurturing.
You know, they love to have them down in the playground at lunchtime.
They love to help.
And they do take them under their wing, and think, "Oh, we'll have to set a better example for them, and interact with them."
The whole school structure has benefited from having a Kindy program.
It was something that this community was looking for, and the kids here were looking for something that they could do prior to school.
I look at my Kindy boys and know that next year, we as a school will not only be ready for them, but they're gonna be ready to join our classroom full-time.