St Lucia Kindergarten

And just like that, Term 1 is over!

What an amazing first term at St Lucia Kindergarten. We are so lucky to have yet another group of wonderful children and families in 2026.

This term, we enjoyed acknowledging several different cultural events including:

🏮 Lunar New Year
🌙 Ramadan & Eid-al-Fitr &
🐣 Easter

We have rich cultural and linguistic diversity within our community at St Lucia, which is so precious to us. We enjoyed celebrating diversity and belonging at our Harmony Day Breakfast 🌎

We also enjoyed two fun incursions, including:

🐠 a Reef Puppet Show (thanks to Kevin who has been visiting St Lucia Kindy for 25 years!) &
♻️ a visit from Recycle Man

Of course, our most important work was to support each child to feel safe, secure and confident in a new environment, and to build strong relationships with children and their families 👧🏼 🧒🏾

We view PLAY as central to a high quality early childhood education, and provided many wonderful spaces, materials and learning opportunities to children outside and inside our classrooms! 🛝 🧩 🎨 🚂

We hope everyone has a safe and happy break, and we will see you for Term 2!

Today, we are farewelling one of our longest serving staff members - Yamuna Abeyratne.

For the past 19 years, the St Lucia Kindy community of children, families and staff have had the pleasure of knowing, and being supported by Yamuna.

Yamuna is always kind, gentle, caring and patient with the children. As an Assistant Teacher, Yamuna has worked tirelessly to ensure that all of the children in her group are supported to feel welcomed, to learn, develop and play, and she has enabled her fellow teachers to have the materials and assistance they need to engage in their work.

Over the past 19 years, Yamuna has provided so many children with a happy Kindy experience. She has given thousands of hugs and thousands more pushes on the swing. She has read hundreds of books, prepared paint pots and collage materials, cleaned countless tables (and bottoms!), and set up so many wonderful provocations for learning inside and outside. Yamunahas taught children to care for themselves, to be kind to each other, to be kind to animals, and to care for the world around them.

Assistant Teachers are the unsung heroes of Kindergartens everywhere, as they are the glue that holds them together. Yamuna has been an exceptional educator and caregiver, and we are so grateful that she has devoted her time, love, effort and energy to St Lucia Kindy.

It is extremely hard to put an acknowledgement of this magnitude into the right words! All we can say is THANK YOU.

Some of our beautiful family survey comments in 2025! We are so grateful to be supported by a fantastic community of families each year. They enable us to do our best and make us feel appreciated 💛

Of course, a lot has been happening at St Lucia Kindergarten and we have a fair bit to catch you up on 🙌🏼

We also have a few shout outs to local businesses who have helped us recently too.

On Friday, our wonderful community of children and families came together for our annual Halloween Disco 💃 🪩 🎃

An overload of sugar was consumed, as well as some delicious pizza from Domino's Pizza.

We are so grateful to the Domino's Pizza Taringa store, as they provided us with a generous discount on our large order of pizzas. The Taringa store have done this year in, year out for us, which has assisted us to raise funds for our Kindy! Thank you to this team 🍕

PLUS…

A few weeks ago, one of our amazing Committee parents organised our first PJs and Toast Day! This was a huge success, with the children rolling out of bed into Kindy, and making their own breakfast!

A HUGE thank you to both Bakers Delight Toowong and Fruity Capers Toowong Village who provided an amazing spread for free!

We had avocados, bananas, mandarins and some delicious loaves of bread to eat 🍌 🥑 🍞

The children had so much fun 🤩

These generous donations of food, allowed us to raise almost $300 from our beautiful families.

All funds this year have assisted us to go on excursions, and buy new playground equipment 🥰

Thank you 🙏🏼

We hope you can join us TOMORROW for our Open Afternoon on Tuesday 21st October from 3:30 - 4:30pm.

Alternatively, we would love for you to share this with a friend or two who might be interested in Kindy options for their child in our local area.

We are still accepting enrolments for Kindy 2026, but everyone is welcome!

You can join our Waiting List for free at our Open Afternoon for 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029 😱

Our families recommend St Lucia Kindergarten because we:

⏲️ offer 2, 3 or 5 day places with After Kindy Care until 5:30pm
🏫 are located next to Ironside State School
🌳 have large natural outdoor playgrounds with beautiful gardens and trees
🎭 include fantastic excursions and incursions in our program
🍂 offer Nature Play Excursions in our local bush reserve
🎉 hold regular social events for families
👩🏽‍🏫 are led by passionate and experienced educators

If you are still considering Kindy for 2026 or beyond, you might want to read some of our 47 x 5 🌟 Google reviews if you're not already convinced - https://www.careforkids.com.au/child-care/4we16/st-lucia-kindergarten-4067

Hope to see you there!

We hope you can join us for our Open Afternoon on Tuesday 21st October from 3:30 - 4:30pm.

Alternatively, we would love for you to share this with a friend or two who might be interested in Kindy options for their child in our local area.

We are still accepting enrolments for Kindy 2026, but everyone is welcome!

You can join our Waiting List for free at our Open Afternoon for 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029 😱

Our families recommend St Lucia Kindergarten because we:

⏲️ offer 2, 3 or 5 day places with After Kindy Care until 5:30pm
🏫 are located next to Ironside State School
🌳 have large natural outdoor playgrounds with beautiful gardens and trees
🎭 include fantastic excursions and incursions in our program
🍂 offer Nature Play Excursions in our local bush reserve
🎉 hold regular social events for families
👩🏽‍🏫 are led by passionate and experienced educators

If you are still considering Kindy for 2026 or beyond, you might want to read some of our 47 x 5 🌟 Google reviews if you're not already convinced - https://www.careforkids.com.au/child-care/4we16/st-lucia-kindergarten-4067

Hope to see you there!

After our second holiday play date at Kindy yesterday with our lovely children and families, some of us enjoyed some fresh mulberries right from our tree!

Of course I forgot to take photos of the mulberries, but instead, you can see the purple stains of mulberry on the children’s hands 😅💜
🖐️

It’s been a lovely silk worm season so far at Kindy, watching the silk worms grow and now make cocoons!

They are definitely hungry little creatures! 🌱

Thank you to our families who have been looking after the silk worms for us over the holidays 🐛

A shout out to our beautiful team who make up St Lucia Kindergarten for Early Childhood Educators Day! 🩵

These fabulous women bring such a wealth of knowledge, experience and passion for high quality early childhood education and care to our Kindy.

We are all particularly passionate about community based (not for profit) Kindergartens. This is where we know children and families thrive 🌟

Listed in order of their years of dedication to St Lucia Kindergarten, we have Anne, Yamuna, Ann, Rochelle, Lucy, Cathy, Hitomi, Keiko and Camilla 🩷

Thank you to each of these wonderful teachers, educators and support staff for their time, effort, love, care and commitment they give to the children, families and our Kindy each day. Thank you 🙏🏼

http://www.stluciakindergarten.com.au/our-team.html