Pine Community School is an independent democratic community primary school for children situated in the leafy bushland of Arana Hills, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. We are committed to providing a caring, harmonious environment where each student's academic, physical, social, emotional, and creative development is attained to their maximum potential. This is achieved through small, multi-age settings, with a high teacher to student ratio, where teachers, parents, and the community work together to nurture positive self-esteem and encourage all students to become responsible and motivated.
A Democratic School is a self-governing school in some capacity, with each community member influencing decisions and outcomes. A contrast might be made with more 'autocratic' school structures, in which power and authority are concentrated in the teachers and adult administrators. In democratic educational philosophy, students, including and especially children, are seen as active participants in their learning and environment. Each student's voice is given weight in decision-making, both personal — for instance, the direction of his or her education — and communal — the rules and adjudications by which the school functions as a whole.
Pine's motto is "Happy Children Learn," and everything in our philosophy and approach stems from that. It starts with the well-researched idea that children learn best when they are happy and relaxed and engaged – when they are interested in what they are doing.
So how do we make this happen? What does it mean to be happy? How do we help our children be happy and thus learn well? For a start, Pine allows children to "have a childhood" – allowing lots of time for play, allowing them to take risks and understand consequences, not enforcing needless structure and control. We allow children to have "downtime" when they are not interested in learning, and we maximize the "uptime" when they are keen and excited and engaged.
Pine teachers are amazingly good at capitalizing on children's ever-changing interests. One of the many examples of this was in late 2007 when a few of the students became very interested in writing their comic books. This was allowed and encouraged, and the interest spread, and several students set up their own "comic book shop" in the school's library room, spending most of each day there for several weeks. They defined roles for themselves (the boss, bodyguard(!), artists, writers, etc.) and produced comics for all the other kids to read. In this process, kids who naturally hated writing were writing like crazy kids who were not good readers were loving reading the comics, and all the kids involved learned a lot about negotiation and teamwork.
Pine Community School is committed to providing a caring, harmonious environment where each student's academic, physical, social, emotional, and creative development is attained to their maximum potential. This is achieved through small, multi-age settings where teachers, parents, and the community work together to nurture positive self-esteem and encourage all students to become responsible and motivated.
Pine Community School is an independent, democratic community primary school. We offer multi-age groupings with a low student/teacher ratio in a caring, harmonious environment. We are committed to partnerships with parents and students that support children's individual learning development holistically (addressing the whole child, including academic, social, physical, emotional, and aesthetic needs). Through a child-centered, co-constructed curriculum, we provide hands-on learning opportunities that challenge and support students' needs and interests. We are passionate about using research-based best practices to engage our students, providing opportunities to learn and develop in play-based and real-life contexts, and having a positive outlook and self-identity. We believe that our school helps children to become confident, capable, and happy learners who care about others and make good choices as citizens. We aim to develop these skills throughout the primary years. Our motto is 'Happy Children Learn' through a partnership of home and school environments.
