A Year is a Lifetime When You're Four

Before Woodleigh's littlest learners arrive at Penbank's Early Childhood Centre (ECC) in the mornings, the room is alive and waiting for them.

If it's cold, the fire is burning, the lamps are glowing and there are books, blankets and cosy nooks with soft music. New work has appeared on the walls overnight and freshly cleaned paintbrushes sit in jars, ready for the day. None of it is haphazard and everything is deliberate.

For Julia Swayn and her team, the morning preparation isn't just about making a beautiful room, although it is beautiful. It is about respect. For the children, for the process and for all those who belong in this space for a whole year.

Because a year is a lifetime when you're four.

A parent of three children, all of whom have come through Woodleigh, Julia first walked through the Penbank doors as a mum. She was looking for an environment that recognised each child, hers and others, as individuals. A trained Reggio Emilia educator, she volunteered in her youngest son's Year 1 classroom, helping with reading and cooking. She then took on a role as a Learning Enhancement Assistant one day a week.

At the end of her first day, she was asked, 'Julia, can you come back tomorrow?'
'Of course,' was her reply.
'No. Can you come back tomorrow, forever?'

Today, her youngest is in Year 9, two are Woodleigh graduates, and the community connections she has built are as strong as ever.

Across every role she has held since those early days, the same idea carries through. 'Children flourish when they are taken seriously,' Julia says. 'Not as future students or school-ready versions of themselves, but as they are now.'

Julia and her team, Mary and Hang, greet families as they come in. If a little one has a dog, they all know its name. If someone has a cat, a parrot or a pet flea, they all know what they like to eat. Soon, everyone comes together in a circle on the mat, knee to knee, giggling, yawning and chatting. Nobody stands at the front, and nobody is squeezed to the back ‘because we’re equal’, Julia says.

This morning routine begins on the first day, as our very little learners ease into their home away from home. It’s also when they talk about their Essential Agreement – a shared conversation that becomes a living record, in their words, not a tidied-up adult version. It hangs on the wall at a four-year-old’s eye level because that’s who it’s for: it’s documentation, not decoration. They check in with their own words and ideas about looking after each other, looking after nature and being kind, even when you’re tired, or your sock has a hole in the toe (a potentially day-ruining event).

That same care can be seen around the room; work on every wall is inclusive and generous, recording everyone’s ideas and work just as it was made. In the Reggio Emilia tradition Julia trained in, a child who has watched an adult take such care of their ideas learns a lot about the value of their voice.

A giant block construction cannot, no matter how determined, be lugged home in a backpack. But, instead of piling it back into the block basket at the end of the day, it’s photographed with their words of explanation beside it, given a place on the wall among the paintings and drawings. The message lands quickly and clearly that what they think matters.

One day earlier this year, the group was working on a project with their teachers, collecting and decorating gum leaves to make Bunjil's feathers. One little boy was not having it.

'Julia, I can't draw Bunjil.'
'I think you can,' she told him.

And he did. The decorated leaves from the three and four-year-old classes were assembled as the feathers of his drawing, which now hangs in the ECC entryway. He stood a little taller.

Part of Julia's work is helping young children see they already have everything they need. The next bit is giving hard things a go.

The human pace around these practices is as much about what the ECC team don't do as what they do. Without rushing to answer, a patch of tree sap on the walk to Bush Kinder becomes a conversation instead of a distraction from the schedule.

Is it honey? Is it blood? Ewww. Is it tomato sauce?

Cicada shells, too, always strange and amazing, and the questions just as strange and amazing.

'Is it an alien?'
'Where do you think it’s come from?'

What might look like restraint from the outside, Julia describes as valuing children and their ideas enough to let them arrive at their own answers.

Last term, mushrooms sprouted at the base of the eucalyptus tree in the ECC garden. Of course they were fairy homes. The fairies became stories and the stories came to life. On the first day of Term 2 the mushrooms had gone, but the fairies had moved into bigger homes.

‘How many bedrooms do you think are in there?’
‘Do they have lights at night?’
‘I wonder too,’ said Mary.

These magical questions and ideas travelled back indoors with them and became block constructions, drawings, sculptures, stories and other world-building creations. Briar spent the weekend making a fairy house with her family before bringing it back to show everyone at morning meeting. The learning travelled home – it meant so much.

When the children decided the fairies needed protection from their bouncy three-year-old ECC friends, they built a fence from sticks and wire. They made flags to remind everyone to be careful. No one told them how, and they didn't ask for help or permission. They just did it, beautifully and carefully.

For a long time, there was an assumption that breadth of learning mattered more than depth: tractors this week, colours next week, outer space the week after that. Julia sees it differently: an interest might last a week, but it might last six months.

A fascination with marble runs began inside and, over the months, has stretched all the way outside into the yard. Lengths of PVC pipe, loose parts, old go-kart tyres and any other possibilities the children can find mean they can test their ideas on a new, giant scale. One idea becomes another. Curiosity turns into experimenting, collaborating, building and problem-solving. As far as they’re concerned, they’re having the time of their lives playing without a care for the incredible cognitive work unfolding in the background.

Central to the Reggio Emilia approach is the belief in the hundred languages of children, the idea that a child’s inner thoughts can be expressed in countless ways. When four-year-old Ray made a song for Fishy – their classroom fish – Julia asked him to write down his music. He had never written music before. But he invented a way to do it. He knew exactly what it said and how to sing it – and so did his friends, and so did Julia.

At the beginning of their year, part of their ceremony is choosing themselves a walking stick. Not a piddly little twig, something with guts, something they can use to get through the bushes while out on their Nature Kinder adventures. Each stick is named and stored carefully in specially made tree stumps. 
‘If your stick could see, what would it be thinking?’ Hang asks them. 
Adventure after adventure, wool and grass are tied on, gumnuts and beads stuck on, and stories and memories attach themselves – like a diary, just not on paper.

When they graduate as giant, almost-five-year-olds, their adventure-sticks go home with them for a next iteration, carrying a year’s worth of stories with it (and all over it!). While the sticks go home, the children carry on – Penbank to Year 6 and Woodleigh through to Year 12, girls and boys together the whole way.

It’s also a reminder, held in their own hands, of a year’s worth of looking after each other, looking after nature and being kind. Their own words that they agreed upon when they first sat knee to knee in their circle, because we’re equal.