We believe that children thrive within warm, sensitive caring relationships; that play enhances children’s well-being, creativity, and knowledge(s) and that challenge produces critical thinking skills and learning possibilities. These beliefs guide our approach to child care including caregiving, relationships with families, inclusion, behaviour guidance and all other aspects of curriculum.
We believe warm caring relationships with the early childhood educators provide children with feelings of belonging, acceptance, and security within their child care centre – feelings that we think support well-being, emerging abilities and overall child development.
We honour and value play. We understand play to be self-controlled and self-directed. We believe that in play children consider relationships between people, living beings, materials, and physical places. We understand play as essential in developing critical thinking abilities and creativity. In our centres, children spend their days exploring their world with ample opportunities to play in both indoor and outdoor environments.
We believe that learning, including physical, cognitive and social/emotional learning occurs within optimal challenge. Limited challenge offers limited potential while too much challenge overwhelms. With this idea in mind, we build risk into our programs while monitoring individual safety.
When planning our programs, and then implementing our plans, we consider all aspects of children’s well-being. Within caring relations, play-honouring and appropriate challenges, the centres offer extensive experiences to support and enhance the development of multiple knowledges and multiple intelligences. We engage with the arts including music and visual arts, with languages and literacy, with mathematical concepts and numeracy, with physical sciences, with physical activity and bodily kinesthetic knowledge, and with nature/culture understandings. To enhance children’s physical growth and development we consider nutrition, sleep requirements and health maintenance as well as opportunities for motor development. We emphasize interpersonal awareness and respect and care for others, alongside emerging self-awareness of emotional states and care of self. We focus on children’s emerging interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation and problem-solving skills, and on their developing abilities to feel and express empathy and to regulate their emotional states. Finally, we use the British Columbia Early Learning Framework as a guide to areas of learning including well-being and belonging, exploration and creativity, languages and literacy and social responsibility and diversity.
Relationships with Families
We believe that open communication, and mutual respect between parents and early childhood educators results in high quality child care. We aim to create spaces where children’s parents and families feel welcome. We do our best to consult with parents  frequently and hope they will ask questions, offer ideas and make suggestions. Parents are welcome to request a meeting with staff for more detailed discussion about any issue. Some situations may be further explored with the Child Care Services Director.
We value parent involvement. Many programs have family socials at different times of the year as a way to build a sense of community among families and to keep parents informed about the program. Some programs invite parents to be involved in practical ways to assist with the program’s smooth operation, including occasional weekend work parties, or small weekly jobs such as picking up fresh produce for snack or taking out the recycling.
We welcome parents in the programs throughout the day while also asking that they consider the impact of their presence on the program and children. For example a very young child may have difficulty saying goodbye twice in one day or, for some children, a drop-in just before nap may make the transition to nap time more difficult. However, we believe that parents’ time spent in the centre can benefit children, families and the program and we encourage parents to discuss their involvement with their centre’s early childhood educators.
Inclusion
UBC CCS values diversity as well as the opportunity to enrich each centre through collaborative relationships with children and their families from all circumstances. We monitor children’s requirements at the time of enrollment and thereafter on an on-going basis. We work in close partnership with local community support services to meet the needs of all children to the best of our ability.
Behavioural Guidance
Each program posts a behavioural guidance policy as per government licensing regulations. The following is a general description of UBC Child Care Services’ guidance policy. The programs adjust their specific policies to reflect their particular group.
Two goals lead our guidance and discipline practices: enhancing children’s sense of personal well-being including belonging, and encouraging children’s sense of social responsibility. A sense of well-being and belonging means that children will feel safe, respected, valued, included and confident. A sense of social responsibility refers to building relationships, to a respect for diversity and to recognizing a connection between their actions and the larger world. We consider both prevention and intervention to meet these goals. Prevention means that we attend to children’s basic needs in a timely manner so as to provide for children’s well-being. We also create and maintain an environment that promotes awareness, interest, and learning to support children’s confidence, purposefulness and responsibility to and for others and the larger world. Intervention refers to the actions we take to meet our goals and includes addressing unsafe, unkind or disrespectful (to others or the environment) behaviours.
Examples of interventions include:
- Supporting problem solving by describing problems that are occurring, listening to children’s (competing) goals, helping to generate solutions and supporting the enactment of the solutions.
- Reflective Listening to help the child understand and interpret their experiences and model appropriate language.
- Re-directing to more acceptable activities to ensure safety or well-being for all e.g. reminding about limits, including the reasons for limits.
During the orientation to the program, staff will review the particulars of that child care program’s behavioural guidance policy with you.
Political Advocacy
We believe that all families should have access to affordable, quality childcare. We may ask you to support our advocacy efforts by writing letters and contacting government officials.