Join us for a day of reflection, connection, and learning Grounded in Trust: Honouring the Unfolding Tamaiti
How the day unfolds:
8:30 Registration
9am Welcome
9:15 Keynote Speaker
10:30 - 3:30 Workshop Sessions
Keynote Elizabeth Emere Harte - Inspired by her mother and grandmother, Elizabeth Emere Harte (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is the founder of Tūpuna Parenting, a movement to reclaim the gentle and respectful parenting ways of pre-colonial Māori. She and her passionate team share this kaupapa in many ways with whānau and professionals, growing awareness and creating impact.
You will have the opportunity to attend three workshops across the day. Each session offers a choice of workshops to explore.
Becoming Intentional Marvellers with Pēpi and Toddlers - facilitator Michelle Flower
Together, we will reflect on how our environments, routines, and teaching approaches either open up or limit the pathways available to pēpi and toddlers. When we predetermine where tamariki are meant to arrive, we risk narrowing where their learning might go. With time, space, and trusting relationships, pēpi and toddlers follow their own pathways, testing theories, revisiting ideas, and learning through rich, sensory exploration.
This workshop invites kaiako to become intentional marvellers, those who pause, notice, and respond to urges by creating an environment of same, same but different.
Tuning In: - facilitator Tineke Kirkbeck-Sutton
An experiential workshop that shares practical ways to grow your culture of considered, responsive and partnered care. Learn how to promote a calm living environment, healthy nervous systems and optimal wellbeing and growth for pēpi and kaiako. This workshop draws from my training and experience at Pikler Haus, Pennie Brownlee Dance with me in the Heart (endorsed provider), work in ECE infant and toddler spaces and over 10 years of parenting groups where this way of being alongside tamariki is explored fully.
“Wellbeing creates an internal environment that naturally promotes curiosity to explore our external environment. This is when we see learning happen organically.” (Tineke)
Trust me to unfold my movement…naturally and unassisted
- facilitator Jay
Learning to move is an innate urge of the infant driven by their intense curiosity to discover their world.
In the first 2 years of life our children experience the most exponential and rapid rate of physical development they will ever experience in their entire lives. Given the opportunity to naturally unfold each of their motor movements, they develop a mastery of the movements and experience many crucial learning dispositions serving them for a lifetime of learning. - curiosity, resilience, trust, perseverance, agency, creativity...
Where you lead, I will follow - facilitator Lynn Rupe
This workshop is grounded in the understanding that mokopuna arrive with deep knowing, shaped through whakapapa and carried across generations. Their dispositions, ways of being, and ways of knowing are already present and unfolding.
Together, we will reflect on how we notice and respond to these cues, and how, as kaiako, we can walk alongside mokopuna in ways that honour their mana, their rhythms, and their right to lead their own learning journey.