Health & Wellbeing

Waterfall Gully Preschool strives to create an environment that assists all members of the service to experience physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing. We recognise the importance of a whole service approach to health and wellbeing.

To become a health promoting service, we are committed to working together to:

develop policies to create a physical and social environment which promotes health and well being
provide an environment that facilitates and encourages healthy choices and lifestyles, and that complements health messages taught in the educational program
ensure respect, fairness and equality is promoted and modeled, and a sense of belonging fostered
encourage educators, staff and families to be positive role models for healthy choices and lifestyles
provide learning opportunities and experiences within the educational program to enable children to gain knowledge and skills and take action to enhance health and wellbeing
Engage children, families, educators and staff as active participants in the promotion of health and wellbeing
Build partnerships with local health professionals, services and the wider community to enhance health promotion capacity
Link children, young people and their families to support services to meet their health and wellbeing needs
Seek continuous improvement through ongoing reflection, monitoring and evaluation

Healthy Achievement Program supported by Peninsula Health

The Achievement Program gives Early Childhood services a simple, evidence-based framework to create a healthy learning environment and support the health and wellbeing of everyone in your service. Give children the best possible start to their learning and development and boost staff productivity – at any age, healthy people perform better.

Health promoting services approach

The Achievement Program is based on the World Health Organization’s model for health promoting schools, an internationally recognised best practice approach for enhancing health, learning and development outcomes.A health promoting services approach is broader than implementing some health and wellbeing activities – although these are important. It involves integrating health into planning and policies, creating a healthy culture and environment, and involving the whole service – children, staff, educators and families in the process. Forging partnerships with the local community is also important.Through the Achievement Program, health and wellbeing becomes embedded in your culture – a part of everyday service life.

See link below for further information.

Healthy Achievement Program

Factsheets and links for families

Building resilience in children Emotional development Self-regulation Social and emotional learning Why play is important