Our Early Education Program (EEP)

One of Port Melbourne Uniting Church kinder’s innovative and unusual features is that we actually have four teachers continually present who can work with both the additional needs and mainstream children, as a proactive, effective team.

Simone Mooney and Elise Denton are Port Phillip specialist school staff who work in our kinder’s Early Education Program (EEP). 

Our EEP teachers strive for the same goals as do those who teach the mainstream program.  It is enormously rewarding to see additional needs children thrive under the right, expert and loving attention of these teachers.  The program’s goals are to provide a learning environment that enhances children’s self-esteem, encouraging them to play, communicate and interact.  Consistent with the mainstream kinder program, the EEP program is also about teaching children to think and learn for themselves – fostering their desire to learn. The EEP teachers focus on children’s individual needs, shadowing them (to some extent).

The EEP program offers 6 hours a week for 3 year olds, and 15 hours a week for 4 year olds. 

Our kinder is unique in Victoria in that we forgo five mainstream enrolments each year so that additional needs children can access the kinder program.  (The program is so successful that we believe there should be kinders like this in every region.)

Our additional needs children include those with chromosomal disorders, varying degrees of autism, not to mention other behavioural and physical development difficulties.  As a result of enrolling in our program and mixing with mainstream children, the EEP children’s socialising and communications skills are vastly improved, thus helping them to develop more quickly.  

Once a week, the occupational therapist visits; at other times, the EEP children are withdrawn into their own room, to enjoy their own space.  (Many times, the children from the mainstream program want to go in there too!)

All our kinder children benefit from EEP – they learn to accept each other’s differences, and to experience a sense of inclusiveness and community, which will be invaluable to them in later years.