New Zealand is known for its rigorous and innovative education system, and its unique philosophy of early childhood is unlike the rest of the world. New Zealand’s Early Childhood Education curriculum, known as Te Whāriki, is the first educational curriculum in the world dedicated to pre-school children. It has the aims of fostering independent and confident individuals, and enables children to benefit for future learning and growth.
Newgen International Education Group is a large educational and cultural enterprise registered in New Zealand. It is located in New Zealand's largest city - Auckland. Its brands occupy high-end education in the local market. The company has several large child care centers, home-based centers, and training centers for teachers. The company also has the only English-Chinese bilingual child care center in New Zealand. Newgen applies first-class education and teaching philosophies, and the latest technology, to remove any national and language barriers. It creates a first-class education brand and engages in international cultural exchanges by taking core concepts from New Zealand, China, and the United States.
Newgen is inspired by two early childhood education philosophies - Reggio Emilia’s approach and Forest Kindergarten. These two philosophies focus on following children's interests, while encouraging and stimulating their potential in creativity, intelligence, and social skills. In the process of education, a child’s development is natural, independent, and not teacher-initiated. These two philosophies are very demanding on the professionalism of educators, in the way that teachers observe the child’s interests in order to develop individual development plans. This means that the child receives " personalized" opportunities of education.
Reggio Emilia’s approach is based on the Constructivism theory of Vygotsky and Dewey. Educators do not have a written teaching plan. The program is based on the child's interests, and is carried out in a project based way. Children can achieve their learning outcomes in any form, such as learning natural science through contact with nature, or creating art and handcraft by observing plants, birds and insects.
Forest kindergarten integrates education from the natural world, children's ‘third teacher’, so that children return to nature while feeling the most innocent enlightenment of education. A heavy rain, a gust of wind, even a small insect and a piece of stone can become a good teacher. The children return to nature and run in the rain, or dig on the beach. There is no physical fence in the forest kindergarten, and imagination is cultivated here.