About
My name is Alecia Payne and I am a Family Day Care Educator for the Holistic Approach Family Day Care Scheme.
Alecia's Family Day Care service provides flexible, and affordable childcare, primarily in out-of-hours spaces. Providing regular weekend, overnight, and casual weekdays of quality childcare. Ensuring childcare is available to families who work rotating shifts, alternate rosters, or for families with other care requirements. The first of its kind in Gippsland.
Alecia's Family Day Care overlooks the Callignee State Forest and is 12 minutes away from the Traralgon CBD. Morwell is located just 20 minutes away. It is set amongst 11 acres of mostly bushland. We have resident wallabies, kangaroos, and the most demanding King Parrots, with loud personalities.
My Story
My family and I moved here from Salisbury, South Australia in December 2018. In Salisbury, I ran a successful, high-quality family day care service for 15 years and worked in other community settings for two additional years. During this time I have completed my Diploma in Children's Services, near completion of my Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood) and near completion of my Bachelor of Psychological Sciences. I am truly devoted to the process of authentic lifelong learning.
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Since moving to the Gippsland region, I have worked for a community service organisation holding various roles within the residential care setting. I have held roles such as, Youth Residential Care Worker, Cluster Worker and South East Regional Night Supervisor.
Yet, I found myself with a fire in my belly to respond to the needs of all young people and their families in the community, with a passion for yielding high quality outcomes from an educational perspective for individual young people. I also have a natural curiosity for how one acquires knowledge.
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My husband Mathew and my daughter Madeline have worked hard over the last 12 months geting the premises to the familiy day care approval stage, with keeping an ecological perspective, as a priority. Thus we have acheived all changes to the property using only second hand materials, which keeps it out of land fill. It was one of our biggest challenges.
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As an educator, I believe the foundation of a quality family day care service is to juxtapose and interpret the education and care syllabus using an educational epistemological understanding to ensure every individual child is able to meet the learning outcomes specified in the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), My time, our place, and progress towards the emergent achievement standards within the Australian Curriculum. This can be achieved through using the guiding EYLF principles, to embed the 'idealisms' of Montessori, Steiner and Reggio Emilia educational approaches to further increase children's learning opportunities being, real and authentic and as suggested by Bruce, to acquire knowledge holistically and to learn through play (2012; Killen, 2003; Pope Edwards, 2002). My personal and professional educational epistemological knowledge and the EYLF principles guide my practices, which nurture a child's holistic development and lifelong learning experiences, but furthermore, it culminates and capitalises on knowledge acquisition in the early years, which makes learning practically visible within the EYLF learning outcomes and the child's every day interactions with 'their' world (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009; Duncan, 2011; Warner & Sower, 2005; lifelong Learning Council Queensland Inc., 2014). My personal philosophy statement, which further elaborates on my practices and educational goals for emergent child development is available on the next page AFDC Philosophy.