Happy Harmony Week! We hope you have been feeling an increased sense of belonging at Flinders this week.
Thank you to our families who have contributed to our Harmony Garden. It is blossoming with stories of belonging, family and community. Your willingness to contribute your stories to our community is much appreciated.
If you haven’t yet added to our Harmony Garden, we invite you to when you can. There are resources in each house to decorate a leaf or bird, and also at the mural, which is situated on the Toddler House wall as you walk up the path from the office to May Mills House.
At Flinders we consider ourselves a “community within a diverse range of communities” (Flinders Philosophy) and as such we are a meeting point for families, children and educators. Our educators and staff work extremely hard to ensure everyone who enters our community feels a sense of being welcomed and belonging, whether they are here for a short time or a long time, whether they have been a part of Flinders for days or for many years, where ever they come from and where ever they are going. Harmony Week is a time when we recognise our successes in this area, and also a time where we plan to do more, to reach more people and become increasingly more welcoming.
As we plan for each Harmony Week, we hope to ‘do better’ than the year before, that the special celebrations from the previous year have now been absorbed into our everyday lives at Flinders and that our next celebrations can be bigger and more beautiful. And whilst educators and staff can plan for this alone, we cannot achieve our goals without the willingness of our families to contribute and share, and the willingness of the children to do the same. A sense of community and belonging cannot be achieved in isolation, it takes many hands and hearts.
So thank you for being one of the many hearts, one of the many pairs of hands, that helps us embrace the ideals of Harmony Day, that everyone belongs in the Flinders Harmony Garden.