Our Program
With nearly 30 years teaching experience, Keryn knows what constitutes an effective program. That's why Keryn uses only the best resources with guaranteed proven results. These resources combined with her own creative impact, form the ‘Keryn Johnson Learning Foundations’. This philosophy and approach to learning ensures the best outcomes for all students.
Other activities that are included in your paid Fees are:
~Yoga with Sophie Nolis, from Spirit Nation, our yoga instructor. She integrates wellbeing with each yoga session.
~Music: Mini Maestro's with Chantelle
~Sport/Physical Education with Taylor from Little Sports Heroes
~Gardening classes
~Incursions and Excursions that contribute to making our learning more meaningful and engaging
Please see information below about some of our resources and techniques, which are also included in your paid Fees.
LITTLE LEARNERS LOVE LITERACY
Little Learners Love Literacy is taught is some of the best and highest achieving schools in Australia such as Haileybury College and Ruyton Early Learning Centre. Little Lerners Loves Literacy teaches children to read, spell and write with confidence. It is developed from evidence-based research with specific goal-based activities to engage children's interest while teaching phonemic awareness and phonic skills to learn to read and write. The letters are introduced in a logical and sequential manner with help from Milo the Monkey. Children thoroughly enjoy discovering each character that is invited to Milo's birthday party and doing the corresponding weekly activity. It is a fabulous multi-sensory program that the children love and get great results from! Little Learners Love Literacy is also supported and backed by the Australian Council of Educational Research.
CUED ARTICULATION
Cued Articulation is a set of hand cues for teaching the individual sounds that letters make. The hand movements are logical – each hand movement represents one sound and the cue gives clues as to how and where the sound is produced. Jane Passy, OAM, devised Cued Articulation while working with a group of children with severe speech and language problems. These children had problems in auditory recall and needed a visual aid to learning. Teachers found that not only did using the cues help the children with difficulties, but it raised the sound awareness skills of everyone in the class. Keryn is trained in Cued Articulation and had used it with her students for close to ten years as a way of tuning children into the explicit individual sounds and giving then a physical clue to help when remembering the sounds of the alphabet.
SOCIAL THINKING
Keryn has over ten years experience with working with children with special needs and is renowned as being an expert autism and behaviour modification educator. Often children with autism and special needs require extra explicit social skills education. Throughout her teaching, Keryn has developed a passion for social skills development. Keryn uses her experience and knowledge to create her own resources along with using and adapting the We Thinkers Curriculum to achieve the best outcomes with social skills education.
The Incredible Flexible You/ We Thinkers!
We also use the Second Step Learning Kit!
More of our social skills programs can be found on our Wellbeing page.
HAPPY HELPING HANDS
Happy Helping Hands is an engaging fine motor skills program that was developed by Keryn after discovering the need for a sequential and explicit fine motor skills program in Pre-Prep and Prep classrooms. It covers hand and finger strength, dexterity, pencil grip and control and cutting skills. It is taught in an engaging manner based on the letter of the week and the characters from our "Milo's Birthday Surprise" book. It soundly prepares your child for writing.
Read the following article on the importance of developing fine motor skills:
https://smartparentadvice.com/fine-motor-skills/
We use Mat Man, one part from Handwriting Without Tears, to help children learn body awareness and preparation for writing.