Reply To: Share your practices

New Families are encouraged to visit often with their child, and to visit at different times of the day, the visits are extend to have a short stay, parent leave, then a longer stay, longer parent leave to assess if they child (and often parent is ready) for a full morning session on their own, progressing to a regular routine day so when parent is back at work or may not be as accessible, the child has started to build a secure relationship with their key teacher..

Within our centre we have many forms of communication with the parents;
Verbal – quick chats on welcome and farewell. Both child and parent are greeted / farewell. This also extend to siblings if they are with their parents.
Phone calls if need extra information quickly
Written; Online portfolio system, private facebook page, emails and photos shared during the day if their child was unsettled at drop off.

Parents are encouraged to share they child’s experiences at the weekend on our online portfolio – this allows teachers to have knowledge about that child that they may not be confident to share initially but will open up once a teachers talks about it….

Pre-covid we would hold whanau evenings – this was initially so the parents/siblings/grandparents could spend time with their child in centre, but also become a support network for parents themselves to meet other parents, especially if they had immigrated to NZ for work and didn’t have many opportunities to meet other parents.

Each year we also survey the parents on didn’t areas that we may want to change or think are not working well. Our parents are also involved in reviewing our centre policies.

While reading the literature, I also thought about how we could support our families who have small business – have a way we can share this around our community to support each other, support local.