Children's Sessions

AnonyMouse_8457 · 2012-02-25T16:48:02+0000

Can you tell I'm doing lots of work today! Another long one sorry! We have an ongoing battle with this and I wondered what others do. We are a school-run pre-school and offer 10 sessions a week of 3 hours each with time within each for lunch as opposed to a lunchclub in the middle. We currently have around 80 children on roll with another 25ish due to start before the end of the school year. We used to have 2 groups - I can't remember the exact pattern but it was something like Group One Mon, Tue, Wed am and Thu, Fri pm and Group Two Mon, Tue, Wed pm and Thu, Fri pm. A few children didn't do those sessions to fit in with parents' working so maybe all mornings. Then we started offering all day and it got a bit more complicated as we now had Groups One and Two, All dayers on some of the days and the odd ones that did sessions outside of the main groups. But it was Ok... ish Now we barely have 2 children doing the same sessions - they are a real pick and mix bunch! We have a couple that do all 10 sessions, some that do 2 full days and a session, some that do all pm, some that do all am and then some that do a complete varied selection! When we (well, me really!) are trying to sort out special days like Red Nose Day or the Christmas Play it is a total nightmare to find 2 sessions that the majority of children attend and then have to decide whether to invote the rest (the play) or let them miss out (RND!) Then there is group time. Each day one of us looks at who is in (up to 32 at the moment) and has a chart of the planned group time activities (6 key workers each doing one from one area so all 6 areas covered) and tries to match the children with an activity they need/haven't done. It's working really well except for the time it takes to do Ah say the FSco and Head, it's simple, each day at group time you just have your key children. you just need to do a different area each day and that's that. Er no because the children that are in all day every day get the same activity twice and the ones that are in less miss out on areas they need because there are 6 areas and 5 days! On Friday I had no key children in the afternoon - out of 11, only 2 do that session and they were both ill! My colleague, however, had 12! Before you suggest setting key workers to sessions - no because they change them at will! We used to do it that each day we just decided separately what we were going to do and then just say to the others eg 'I'm doing sorting today, do any of yours need that? Yes, good I'll take him... what are you doing? Oh brilliant so and so needs that...' It worked as each key worker did activities to suit their children's next steps but we had nothing written to show what we were doing. This is why we went to a more formal way. I like it as it means that certain staff members do have to work with all 6 areas and not just wait for someone else to do it so they could send their children to them IYSWIM but obviously it's not ideal. We also do a language programme called Language Spirals and after spending a good half hour trying to find the least amount of sessions that covered all 16 identified children and printing it out... 2 of them changed their sessions and didn't fit the plan grrrrrrr. What I'm getting at in a very long winded way is... It would be so much easier if we could say right you either do all mornings or all afternoons (for example) so we knew for sure who was in and when!! Plus once they are set THAT IS IT! No swapping. We have 2 rooms now after moving to new building last May. When we moved we split the group so we had the ones going to school in one room and those here another year in the other. Made sense. In September, didn't think it through and moved all of those up to continue the not/going to school split. Problem was of course that the new children start one or two a day and come in as they hit 2y 9m - 3 so we have had 2 or 3 children in there... the most we have had is 11 - in a 24 place room! Oops. It hasn't been an issue as once they are in and registered they can go in either room but we are changing to separate rooms this September so that won't do! Consequently I've been trying to work out where to make the cut off of age so we can move say all the children who will be 4 between Sept and Feb straight away then move the others across half termly according to how many new ones we have. This would be great but with their varied sessions this leaves us with 2 on some sessions and 9 on others. They will pick some up I guess (many only do 2 or 3 in the younger room) but even so if they had to fit into one of 2 sets of sessions we would haven even number of children across the days. On the other hand I want us to be flexible and offer a really good service!

By AnonyMouse_8457
February 25, 2012 in All Early Years settings & Childminders: General Issues

https://beta.eyfs.info/forums/topic/32990-childrens-sessions/

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