Best practice is a big idea when it comes to caring for your child. Best practice –a term which essentially means providing the best for your child at every opportunity, also means there are lots of occasions in which you can attempt to meet this big idea. At Child’s Play, we are striving for best practice every day; it’s not something you can achieve because you should always be striving to do more.
Consistency
One of our main focuses in providing best practice is consistency. We are looking at how best to ensure your children have the same educators in their room each day. We feel that it is extremely important to both you and your child for a few different reasons. Consistency is:
- essential in ensuring educators know your child fully; know your child’s routine, your child’s medical history or allergies, and knowing your child’s likes and dislikes.
- important in helping a child to begin in care – through seeing the same faces and starting to build strong relationships.
- crucial to you as parents so you can get to know the educators who will be looking after your child, and building trust and confidence in their ability to look after your little one.
Rostering Familiar Faces
When considering consistency in educators, it is also important to consider their shifts and how illness may affect this. At Child’s Play, the rostering of shifts is completed a month at a time to ensure that for an entire month your child will know who will be there to greet them in the mornings and who will be there to play with until they are picked up. Where illness is concerned, we look for the most effective ways to ensure the same faces are in each room, even shuffling shifts to ensure permanent educators are in on the earlier and later times.
Programs
Incursions are a big part of the program we offer right from our youngest children through to kindergarten. We feel it is vital to provide children with a variety of opportunities for learning. These programs focus on different developmental areas and child interests, from musical exploration to physical development and even allow your child to further language development through learning some Chinese language. As children become older and more independent, we also look to provide excursions for even further opportunities for learning. We are exploring what children can investigate and learn in different environments and how we can bring these aspects into our day to day learning.
More than the foundations of a good childcare
Best practice also means striving for more than the basic legal requirements and looking at qualifications, programming, ratio and first aid requirements. In ensuring the best program for your child, educators are provided with much more programming time than the legal requirements. This is to ensure ample time to create the best learning environments, time to explore different developmental areas and communicate all this with you through observations and developmental summaries.
Exceeding first aid and qualification requirements also means there is less concern about different scenarios arising, and ensuring everyone feels qualified in dealing with them. Similarly, the ratio of educators can be at the most basic level, but wherever possible, having additional educators means safer environments, and more meaningful interactions are possible with more of the children.
Final Thoughts
Best practice is something worth striving for in the interest of your children, something that at Child’s Play, we are always striving to reach. If you would like to find out more please get in touch with one of our educators or download our handbook.