New role questions

[Melissa.metlika]

Hi everyone,
I have just taken on a new position in my OSHC service as Team Leader. This role has only just been created to help reduce the coordinators work load as she has been doing everything by herself.
My role includes programming and planning.
I am currently studying my diploma and am almost finished but have had NO experience in programming and planning. My question is what would be the best way to go about it? What resources should I look up on? What’s the best effective way to do it (i only get 4 hours a week of admin time)
An overview on my service is - we only do after school care and school holidays. My main focus for now is ASC. We usually arrive at our service at 3:45, get straight into afternoon tea then have our afternoon activities. There is normally myself and one other staff member there and we average 18 children a day. We currently only have a very basic weekly plan, and have not got our observations or portfolios happening. This is something I want to change but find it hard to just get our daily journal done in the 2 hours we have on the floor.
I have come from a LDC background so I’m still trying to find the best way to tackle the short time frame we have to get documenting done. Any suggestions or comments would be much appreciated and I look forward to seeing your comments!
Thank you Melissa

[Lorina]

Just wanted to know that I have a response for you, however my info is another device at home so I’ll answer your question once I get home by evening...

,
Lorina

[Lorina]

Ok, I'm back!

One of the greatest things about working in OOSH is that the children are older and they can actually help with your programming and planning. For example, the daily journal you don't need to write that yourself, I would get the children's help to write it. So, for those children who are interested they could briefly write what happened during the afternoon and others can add to it. Instead of doing the daily journal on an A4 sheet you can do it on A3 and children can add little comments to it. At the end of the day, you can just evaluate the overall day (a paragraph) then if you want to add follow up activities.

Here is another idea to g et the children more involved:Child Activity Review - The Child Activity Review template can be used by children in OOSH services to review activities that they had engaged in throughout their time at the service. This information can then be used by you to further plan or change activities based on the review by the children.


Daily Evaluation For Children - The "Daily Evaluation For Children" template is for children (older toddlers, preschoolers and school children) to evaluate and give feedback to you on the experiences set up for them to participate in throughout the day.

So, using these two forms, you can get the children more involved in your documenting so you don't have to spend a lot of your own time doing it.

With observations, keep it extremely simple since the children are only in OOSH for a couple of hours. As simple as the activity name, date, a paragraph of what you observed and link to to the MTOP, add a follow up if required, that's it... Simple and quick.

As for Portfolios, the children can do them, themselves! They can add, to it, decorate it, add artwork etc. All you need to add is the observations etc.

Keep it as simple as possible... it doesn't have to be as full on like documenting in LDC!

Hope this gives you some ideas to get started!

,
Lorina

[Lorina]

You can also check out our EYLF Templates to give you inspiration for your program...

Let me know if you have any more questions!

,
Lorina

[Melissa.metlika]

Thank you so much for your reply, I’ll have a good look through those documents and if I have more questions I’ll ask. Truely appreciate it

[Lorina]

No problem!

Happy to help!

,
Lorina