Enrolments Are Open For Hope Island's New Beautiful Early Learning Environment!

Harmony Early Learning has launched a revolutionary new facility and curriculum in Hope Island, Gold Coast for children from birth to 5 years!  

Harmony Hope Island has been designed with a focus on the unique needs of children, promoting physical activity and a connection among children that improves behaviour, self-esteem, and academic performance. 

Peter Warner, Chief Executive Officer of Harmony Early Learning, said that active design spaces and a shifting focus on incorporating a sense of community in the early learning experience will be increasingly important in supporting developmental milestones, particularly through difficult times that can feel confusing and unstable to children when they are at their most impressionable.

“Environment plays a pivotal role in a child’s development, physical health and wellbeing, and directly affects their interaction with society. With the pandemic challenging us all over the past year, rarely has there been a greater need for a normal and stable environment to deliver healthy personal development for our children,” said Mr Warner. 

“The imaginative use of material to bring spaces to life is becoming critical in personal development. We are seeing this among adults, who face changing workspaces and working environments in the face of this pandemic, but there remains a gap when applying this knowledge to the development of our children. This is what we’re aiming to overcome with Harmony’s new centre.

“We wanted to use safe, natural materials, and large floors and walls to allow for areas of creation with different degrees of transparency and scale. The result is an aesthetically comforting and exciting place for children to grow and learn with one another.

“We’ve also increased exposure to green spaces to stimulate positive health outcomes, including stress management and improved mental health, which is becoming so critical in our society, and developed learning spaces that have both natural and built features to connect children to nature and facilitate creative physical activity. The effect is a facility unlike anything we’ve produced or seen produced in Australia before,” he said.

Beyond the physical benefits of spatial design, the facility has been developed to reproduce a community atmosphere and encourage the participation of the local community in the development of their children 

“It has been well documented that the role of parents and community in the social development of children is vital, and we wanted to design the facility in a way that allowed for parents to develop that community around their children,” said Mr Warner.

“The Harmony Hope Island complex has a cafe and social areas for parents to meet and have a coffee after dropping off the children, fostering an interconnectedness in the lives of their children that can provide stability and opportunities for further interaction in different environments.

“As part of this broader community development, we’ve also partnered with the Rackley Swimming centre, which is within the same complex as our centre. Their team can collect swimming groups from the centre in the afternoon and take them for their lessons, saving our parents a lot of time but more importantly allowing the children to move and engage in different activities as a community. These activities are excellent for social development.” 

Underpinning Harmony’s new approach to physical learning is a new, evidence-based early learning curriculum, the Active Early Learning (AEL) Study. Completed over 2 years with over $2 million invested, the curriculum is proven to provide children with the essential skills needed for their first year of school.

AEL was implemented in partnership with the University of Canberra and Deakin University by world leading researchers, resulting in the development of an integrated curriculum which has been proven to positively impact children’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development. The implementation of the curriculum at Hope Island will be overseen by Harmony’s Centre Director, Ms Jasmine Facey.

“AEL is all about integrating physical literacy into children’s daily routines and is delivered by our professional educators in collaboration with the Australian College of Physical Literacy. Building physical competence and confidence through activities designed to encourage the enjoyment of being both physically and mentally active underwrites everything that we do,” said Ms Facey.

“The full curriculum and activities are included in everyday fees, it is fundamentally important to our entire approach that children are supported by an equal playing field with equal opportunities,” she said.

Want to check it out? You can book your free tour of Harmony Early Learning here in time for enrolments starting in February 2021!

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