Showcasing Your Kindergarten

Got a great story to tell about a kindergarten event, excursion, learning activity, or whānau community happening? There are a number of different opportunities to showcase individual stories through Kidsfirst’s own digital channels.

It’s so easy to get your submission in via the Story Submission form on this site. Simply tell us a bit about your story idea, attach a couple of good photos (with permission) and hit the ‘submit’ button. You can select how or where you’d like your story to be used - internally for this publication, or for external channels including Facebook, the Online News section of the website and Whānau Connect, the news pages focused on promoting kaiako wisdom on issues of interest to families of young tamariki. You can read examples of stories from the Whānau Connect here.

It’s always great to see your hard work on display, but there are other reasons why we love to tell kindergarten stories and highlight the great work our teaching teams are doing:

• Whānau making a decision about the best place for their children will often check out Kidsfirst’s Facebook page or do a deep dive into the website. Having your kindergarten featured gives them more of a feel about how it is different and what to expect.

• Facebook helps us build whānau engagement, and also spreads the word about Kidsfirst through the individual pages of parents, caregivers and friends, to their own Facebook followers.

• Activity that happens in our kindergartens deepens the Kidsfirst story, highlighting the areas that make kindergarten, and our network, special. It’s good to promote our Big Backyards, but even better to show tamariki learning, playing, having fun and caring for them. Remember, we like to underpin our posts with our #betterbecause messages that set us apart from other ECE services.

There are a number of different types of social media post you’ll see:

‘Brand’ level promotion: highlighting the Kidsfirst difference. These are usually part of wider Facebook advertising campaigns

Kindergarten News posts: day-to-day happenings in our kindergartens, including special ‘days’, ‘weeks’, ‘months’ or cultural events. We are always keen to hear about upcoming events in kindergartens so we can reserve a spot on the calendar for a post or photo album.

Birthday posts: with almost 70 birthdays, many of them clustered towards the start of the year, it can be a challenge to fit them all in. This year, we’re trialling clustering them in batches of up to half a dozen at a time to leave more room for other kindergarten happenings and photos, while still marking these special days. We do make space for photos from individual birthday celebrations when they come in, though. So please do let us know if you’re planning on something special.

What’s Happening: this is a new kind of post we’re running in 2021 to accommodate requests to promote specific community events being run or attended by kindergarten teams. We’ve reserved a slot each Friday to detail what’s going on each weekend - if you’d like to be added to the list, please be sure to get your submission in by the start of the week so we can reserve some space for it.

Bicultural highlights: regular posts on Instagram promoting te reo, and highlights of events and learning activities on Facebook.

We do tend to hear from the same teaching teams over and over again, and we’re always grateful for the effort they put into getting information together and getting in touch. We’re also excited to hear from kindergartens we haven’t had a lot of content from. So please keep the submissions rolling in.

If you haven’t already Liked or Followed the Kidsfirst page, we’d love to see you there! It’s always great to see the comments, support and encouragement on posts from other teaching teams, too. Such a great living example of the Kidsfirst value of Whānau - and it helps build a sense of real community. And please encourage existing and prospective whānau to like and share our stories.