Daisy Lane Early Learning acknowledges the Turrbal and Yuggera/Jagera peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters of Drewvale and south Brisbane. We pay our deep respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and honour their enduring connection to Country, culture, and community — including their traditions of honouring the women who sustain family and community life across generations.
Every morning at Daisy Lane Early Learning, a singing bowl sounds.
That gentle, resonant tone moves through our rooms and our garden, calling children into stillness and presence before the day begins. It is a moment of quiet belonging — a reminder that before anything else, we are here together, and together matters.
On Mother's Day — Sunday, 10 May 2026 — that sense of togetherness will feel richer than ever. Because at Daisy Lane, we are not one kind of family. We are many kinds of families. Our community includes families who have come to Drewvale from across Australia and from countries around the world, carrying with them the languages, foods, music, and traditions of cultures that celebrate the love between mothers and children in beautifully different ways.
This May, we are inviting all of those traditions into our centre.
Cultural Mothers is our celebration of the extraordinary diversity of ways that the world honours maternal love — because while the date, the flower, the food, and the custom may differ from one culture to the next, the feeling is always the same: profound, ancient, and universal.
One Love, Many Languages
The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) is clear that the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines emphasise the necessity of promoting cultural competence — making curriculum decisions that respect and include children's diverse ways of being and knowing, and their social and cultural experiences.
Cultural competence, as the EYLF V2.0 describes it, is much more than an awareness of cultural differences. It is about respecting multiple ways of knowing, seeing, and living. It is about celebrating the richness that diversity brings to our community — and understanding that when children learn about the cultures of the families around them, they are developing the empathy, curiosity, and open-heartedness that will shape their entire lives.
Celebrating international Mother's Day traditions is one of the most joyful, concrete, and developmentally meaningful ways we know to bring cultural learning to life. Children do not need to be told that the world is full of different ways of loving. They need to see it. Hear it. Touch it. Taste it. And at Daisy Lane, that is exactly what our Cultural Mothers program offers.
Around the World in Mother's Day Traditions
🌸 Japan — Haha no Hi (母の日)
In Japan, Mother's Day (Haha no Hi) is celebrated on the second Sunday of May — the same day as Australia. But the traditions have their own beautiful character.
The traditional gift is red carnations — chosen for their symbolism of a mother's gentle strength and enduring love. Children draw portraits of their mothers, which are sometimes submitted to community art competitions. Families share special home-cooked meals, and the red carnation appears everywhere: in shops, in hair, on lapels.
At Daisy Lane, we bring Haha no Hi into our art space: children create portrait drawings of their special person — in the Japanese tradition of careful, loving observation — using red and pink as their colour story. Each portrait is a small act of the same kind of attention that Japanese children have been giving their mothers for generations.
🎵 Mexico — Día de Las Madres
In Mexico, Mother's Day is always on 10 May — never moveable, never a Sunday by accident. It is fixed, certain, and celebrated with extraordinary vibrancy.
The night before Mother's Day, families gather so children can be home for Mother's Day Eve. And then, in the small hours of the morning, mothers are serenaded with mariachi music — specifically the beloved song "Las Mañanitas," the Mexican birthday and celebration song that says: "Today is your day. Today you wake to singing."
There is something deeply moving about the idea of a mother being sung awake by the people who love her. At Daisy Lane, we learn Las Mañanitas together — just a few lines, just the melody — and we sing it on Mother's Day morning for the caregivers who come to share our celebration. Music crosses every language barrier. Even our smallest children can participate in the gift of a song.
🎉 Ethiopia — Antrosht
In Ethiopia, there is no single Mother's Day — there is a three-day festival called Antrosht, celebrated as the rainy season ends, somewhere between October and November. And it is magnificent.
Families gather from near and far for singing, dancing, and a great communal feast. The children each bring something: traditionally, boys bring meat and girls bring vegetables, spices, and dairy. Together, the family makes a shared dish — a hash, slow-cooked and generous — that belongs to everyone but is made for the mother at the centre of it.
What strikes us most about Antrosht is its emphasis on everyone contributing their part to honour the woman who holds the family together. At Daisy Lane, this principle — that honouring those we love is a collective act — is at the heart of everything we do. We adapt this spirit in our program by inviting children to each bring something from home to contribute to our shared Mother's Day table: a flower, a drawing, a food, a word.
🌺 Thailand — Queen's Birthday and Jasmine
In Thailand, Mother's Day falls on 12 August — the birthday of Queen Sirikit, the Queen Mother — and has a ceremonial, national quality that infuses even family celebrations. The flower of the day is jasmine — its white petals a symbol of pure, unconditional maternal love.
At schools and centres across Thailand, children wear jasmine corsages and participate in ceremonies honouring both their own mothers and the national mother figure of the Queen. The emphasis is on devotion and respect — a formal, heartfelt acknowledgement of the depth of a mother's sacrifice and love.
We bring jasmine into our space in May — real jasmine from our garden or from a local nursery — and we talk with children about why different cultures choose different flowers and what each one means. Jasmine for purity. Carnations for strength. Flowers themselves as a universal language of love.
🤲 Arab World — Eid el-Omm
Across Arab countries — including Egypt, where the tradition began in 1956, and spreading to Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq and beyond — Mother's Day (Eid el-Omm) falls on 21 March, the first day of spring.
In Arab traditions, Mother's Day is expansive: it celebrates not only biological mothers but every maternal figure — grandmothers, aunties, teachers. Children kiss their mothers' hands as a gesture of profound love and respect. Families dedicate songs to the mothers in their lives. Cards and flowers are given to grandmothers and mothers-in-law as well as mothers.
This broad, inclusive understanding of who deserves to be honoured resonates deeply with the Daisy Lane philosophy. At our centre, we celebrate every maternal figure — whoever plays that role in a child's life. The Arab tradition of hand-kissing, adapted gently for our little ones, becomes a beautiful moment in our program: children bring their drawings or gifts and present them with a small, deliberate gesture of love and respect.
🍰 United Kingdom — Mothering Sunday
In the United Kingdom, Mother's Day is called Mothering Sunday and falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent — meaning it moves each year, and often arrives in March rather than May.
Mothering Sunday has ancient roots: it began as a day when people returned to their "mother church" — the church where they were baptised — and eventually became associated with giving flowers and gifts to mothers. The traditional cake is a simnel cake — a rich fruit cake with marzipan, decorated with eleven balls representing the apostles (minus Judas).
For families in our community with British heritage, this tradition may mean they have already celebrated one Mother's Day in March — and now celebrate again in May. We love this: any tradition that creates more moments of appreciation for the women who raise us is a tradition worth honouring.
🌸 India and Nepal — Mata Tirtha Aunshi
In Nepal, and among Hindu communities across Asia and the world, Mata Tirtha Aunshi (Mother Pilgrimage Fortnight) is observed on the new moon day in the Hindu month of Baisakh — which falls in April or May. This tradition predates the modern Western Mother's Day by centuries.
Families prepare special foods and participate in pilgrimage and prayer. Mothers who have passed away are remembered with particular tenderness, and living mothers are honoured with gifts and gatherings. The thread of connection between living and remembered mothers — between those who are here and those who have gone — gives this celebration a depth and spiritual richness that is uniquely beautiful.
In our program, we take this as an invitation to talk with children, gently and age-appropriately, about grandmothers and great-grandmothers — the maternal ancestors who are part of a family's story even when they are no longer present. Who was your mum's mum? What do you know about her?
What Our In-House Chef Cooks for the World
At Daisy Lane, food is love made visible. And our in-house chef has been gathering inspiration from the diverse Mother's Day traditions of our community for this year's Cultural Mothers celebration.
Throughout May, our seasonal menu will include dishes inspired by the culinary traditions of Mother's Day celebrations around the world — warming broths, fragrant rice dishes, seasonal sweets, and flavours that carry in them the particular warmth of being fed by someone who loves you.
Our chef also extends an open invitation to families: share a recipe that your family makes for Mother's Day. Any recipe. Any culture. Any tradition. We will cook it together with the children, with your family's permission, and serve it in our celebration. Because the highest form of cultural education is tasting.
Cultural Mothers at Daisy Lane: What Our Program Includes
Throughout May, our Cultural Mothers program unfolds across our rooms and outdoor spaces:
The World Mother Map — A beautiful visual provocation in our main learning space, where children and families add pins and drawings to a world map showing where their families come from and how they celebrate mothers. By Mother's Day, it will be covered.
Songs for Mothers — We learn simple songs of gratitude and celebration from different cultures: Las Mañanitas from Mexico, a lullaby from Japan, a simple counting song in a community language, whatever our families share with us. Our morning singing bowl session becomes, in May, a song for every kind of mother.
The Portrait Gallery — Inspired by Japan's Mother's Day portrait tradition, every child creates a careful, loving drawing of their special person. These are displayed in our centre gallery and given as gifts on Mother's Day morning.
The Flower Exploration — Carnations, jasmine, and local blooms from our garden and playground. Children explore the scents, textures, and meanings of the flowers different cultures choose to honour mothers, building language, sensory awareness, and cultural knowledge all at once.
Family Tradition Sharing — We invite families to share their own Mother's Day traditions with us: a story, a recipe, a photograph, a song, a few words in their home language. These become part of our learning, and we celebrate each one with the same genuine warmth.
Frankie, Bluey, Smokey — and the Mothers of the Natural World
At Daisy Lane, our beloved Frankie the Frog and our beautiful birds Bluey and Smokey are members of our community. In May, they remind us of something quietly profound: the care and nurturing of young lives is not uniquely human. It is one of the most ancient and universal acts in the living world.
Across cultures, across languages, across every tradition we are exploring this month — the love of a mother for her child is recognised as something foundational, something worth pausing to honour, something the whole world finds ways to celebrate.
That universality — that shared human (and living world) experience — is what our Cultural Mothers program ultimately teaches. Not that the traditions are all the same. But that the love they express is.
Why Cultural Education Matters at Daisy Lane
Our centre's philosophy is built on a simple, profound belief: every child deserves to feel safe, seen, and celebrated.
To be seen means to be seen fully — including your cultural identity, your family's traditions, the language your grandmother speaks, the way your family marks the seasons and the occasions that matter. When a child's culture is reflected in their early learning environment, they receive a message that goes far deeper than any curriculum: you belong here, completely, as you are.
The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority confirms that a child's social and cultural environment — both at home and in their early childhood setting — directly influences their learning and development. Cultural competence is not an add-on or a special occasion. It is the daily practice of seeing and celebrating the full humanity of every child in our care.
And for the non-Indigenous, non-multicultural children in our program — for every child whose family has been in Australia for many generations — learning about the world's diverse Mother's Day traditions is not less relevant. It is, in some ways, even more important: it is how we grow children who will move through a diverse world with curiosity, respect, and genuine warmth for people whose traditions differ from their own.
EYLF and Cultural Mothers: The Framework Behind Our Celebration
Our Cultural Mothers program is grounded in the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) V2.0, the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines (QKLG), and the EYLF's Principle 4: Respect for Diversity:
- Outcome 1 – Strong sense of identity: Children whose cultural heritage is celebrated in their learning environment develop a stronger, more confident sense of who they are.
- Outcome 2 – Connected to their world: Exploring the Mother's Day traditions of cultures from Japan to Ethiopia to Mexico builds genuine understanding of the world's diversity — making children more curious, more empathetic, and more connected to the human story they are part of.
- Outcome 3 – Strong sense of wellbeing: Belonging is health. A child who knows their family's traditions are welcomed and celebrated at their centre is a child who feels genuinely, securely well.
- Outcome 5 – Effective communicators: Learning words in other languages, hearing stories from different cultures, and having their own family's traditions reflected back to them in the learning space — all of this builds the rich, multi-layered communicative competence that the EYLF champions.
Celebrate With Us
Mother's Day at Daisy Lane Early Learning is, as it always is, a family occasion — warm, inclusive, and alive with the particular joy of a community that genuinely loves each other.
Every family. Every tradition. Every kind of mother.
Everyone belongs.
📍 4 Buckley Drive, Drewvale QLD 4116 📞 07 2802 5430 ✉️ enrolments@daisylaneearlylearning.com.au 🌐 daisylaneearlylearning.com.au 🕐 Open Monday – Friday, 6:30am – 6:00pm
Sources
The following Queensland-based and nationally recognised early childhood sources were used in the research and writing of this blog post. No other early childhood or childcare services have been cited as sources.
- Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) – Cultural Diversity: Kindergarten Research Insights qcaa.qld.edu.au – Cultural Diversity — A Queensland Government education authority resource on promoting cultural competence in early childhood settings, including the QKLG requirement to make curriculum decisions that respect and include children's diverse ways of being and knowing.
- Queensland Department of Education – Inclusion Ready earlychildhood.qld.gov.au – Inclusion Ready — Queensland Government framework stating that children and families from all social, cultural, community and family backgrounds must be welcomed and celebrated in Queensland early learning services.
- Queensland Department of Education – Positive Relationships with Children earlychildhood.qld.gov.au – Positive Relationships with Children — The Queensland Regulatory Authority's Statement of Shared Commitment, emphasising the role of early childhood services in ensuring positive, inclusive experiences and genuine belonging for every child and family.
- Queensland Department of Education – Resources for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities earlychildhood.qld.gov.au – Resources for ATSI Communities — Queensland Government resources connecting culture, Country, and early learning, including the Elders as Storytellers initiative and community resources for culturally inclusive early learning practice.
- Queensland Government – Early Childhood Education qld.gov.au – Early Childhood — Queensland Government information on the EYLF V2.0 and its Principle 4 (Respect for Diversity), the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines, and the role of cultural competence in early childhood education.
- Queensland Government – Resources for Parents and Families qld.gov.au – Resources for Parents — Queensland Government guidance for families on supporting children's cultural identity, sense of belonging, and connection to their family's cultural heritage through everyday activities and community engagement.
- Early Childhood Australia – Queensland Committee earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au – Queensland Branch — Queensland's peak advocacy body for early childhood education and care, providing research and resources on cultural competence, inclusion, diversity, and best practice in culturally responsive early childhood settings.
- Sunshine Coast Gallery (Sunshine Coast Council, QLD) – The Impact of Art on Children's Development gallery.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au – The Impact of Art on Children's Development — A Queensland cultural institution on how creative experiences — including portrait-drawing, cultural art-making, and artistic exploration of diverse traditions — support cognitive, emotional, and identity development in young children.
Daisy Lane Early Learning is a warm, family-focused early learning centre in Drewvale, south Brisbane, where every child deserves to feel safe, seen, and celebrated. We care for children from nursery through kindergarten, Monday to Friday, 6:30am to 6:00pm. Our in-house chef prepares fresh, nutritious meals daily. We acknowledge the Turrbal and Yuggera/Jagera peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the Country on which our centre stands. To enquire about enrolment or to share your family's cultural traditions with our community, please contact our friendly team today.
