Early Childhood

So the following is very tongue in cheek, but I thought it good for a giggle and know a few of you will as well.

The funding cuts can be accomodated with a few Green adjustments.Posted by David Berry on May 27, 2010 at 10:30pm


.Well the cuts are on their way, time to prepare.
First off despite Tolley's advice, you don't want to cut staff, and for anyone with 4 or less trained staff it'll drop you below Tolley's target anyway.
Secondly increasing your fees is also out as this will push away the very families Tolley wants us to target.
Therefore we need to adjust other operational costs, here's a few green tips.

1) Sell all playground equipment over 10cm in height on trademe. Maintaining bark and other safe fall then becomes unnecessary, saving several thousands a year, indeed the bark now made surplus can be resold to garden centres, saving trees.

2) Need replacement balls and sports equipment, have parents make them by balling up old soiled clothes unsuitable for second hand shops, donated tree prunings also have a variety of uses. Some of Africa's top soccer stars started this way.

3) Art supplies and paper consume endless money, do replace these with a patch of dirt and some donated sticks, parents will appreciate not having to find space to hang art.

4) Earn extra dollars and get nails for carpentry by taking walks to collect old nailed filled wood from demolition sites. Children can pull nails, get exercise and gain experience in eye foot coordination.

5) Arrange to have the power and telephone cut off, in cold weather emergency closures are your friends. Don't consider burning surplus carpentry wood sourced in 4 above, it's not green, cold children simply need more physical activity. Face to face conversations are more personal and effective than phones and emails anyway. Children who stay after 5:30pm in winter or who start early will have excellent learning opportunities in astronomy.

6) Printing costs have skyrocketed with learning stories, so stop printing these out, it's a waste of trees. Instead either feedback to parents face to face or allow staff to leave the premises in their non contact time and prebook time on free public computers such as some libraries provide. Save learning stories on online e-profiles. (Alternately use existing laptops, charged at public power points by hacking local wireless sources.)

7) Stop buying toys, mud and dirt are great playthings, mud can be shaped and polished into shiny mudballs, animals and more. Mud is a great replacement to playdough and finger paint, better yet mud soiled clothing is a great source of cloth balls (see 2 above), and mud and rags can make great dolls. Many kindergartens already have mudpits, they just need to be bigger!

8) Sack the cleaners, after all everything's covered in mud, don't worry about dirty toilets, take a leaf from forest kindergartens. With a spade and a neighborhood tree, you not only nourish the tree but help keep our rivers clean. Your children will develop much better immune systems and have less allergies without all the cleaning chemicals.

9) Acorns and other nuts, along with stones and small sticks can be collected on walks for math's resources. (Anne Tolley should not be confused with a math's resource.) Local wild foods can be gathered and used for both math's and nourishment. No need to buy staff expensive morning tea or coffee, when you have wild food and road kill available, Dandelion root when prepared right is an excellent coffee substitute and road kill pheasant is very pleasant (if not to squashed.)

10) Books are unnecessary for children and expensive, the written word is dying and being replaced by symbols, when was the last time you saw "women", not a picture of a lady on the loo. Besides Chinese is rapidly becoming the lingua Franca, much as English once replaced the old one. In the meanwhile relearn the art of story telling, Steiner has some great ideas for telling stories with simple props.

11) Much science can be taught with sticks, stones and ropes, harvest local stiff harakeke and extract the fibres with the children to make ropes, tell the story of Maui and the sun while you do so since you no longer need your hands to hold a book (see 10 above.)

12) Recycling centres and rubbish tips are a great source of wheels and other exciting playthings, and may even stock low cost, low care pets.

13) Get corporate sponsorship of staff uniforms and children's sunhats, try and keep this in line with your services goals, obviously the national party will be out, but "vote green!" should be well in your range.


Change is opportunity!