Out of School Hours Care

WELCOME

WELCOME to Tea Tree Gully OSHC.

It is our aim and philosophy to provide a safe, warm, friendly, inclusive and caring environment for your children at all times. We do this by providing adult supervision, a relaxing and comfortable environment, and a range of challenging, rewarding and exciting activities that children can participate in on a day-to-day basis. It is also important that everyone, including children, staff and parents, have the right to feel safe at our service and that everyone also feels comfortable about their choice to be actively involved in the day to day running of the program.

We believe children learn through play and by using our service, we help them develop intrinsic skills such as cooking, caring about others, sharing, tidying up after themselves etc. We encourage social interaction between children of different genders, age groups, religion and include children with additional needs.

Our staff members are known to the children on a first name basis, to encourage positive communications between children and adults. We believe this helps also to create a friendly, trusting and relaxed atmosphere in which ALL children can feel respected and valued.

TTGPS OSHC has a number of goals on which our service is based. These goals are based on the outcomes for children as outlined in the My Time, Our Place Framework for School Age Care.

Our goals are to encourage children to:

Have a strong sense of identity – the service aims to teach children to demonstrate a capacity for self-regulation, negotiating and sharing behaviours by motivating and encouraging children to succeed when they are faced with challenges.
Be connected with and contribute to their world – the service demonstrates awareness of connections, similarities and differences between people and how to react in positive ways by encouraging children to listen to others and to respect diverse perspectives.
Have a strong sense of wellbeing – the service aims to teach children to show self-regulation and manage their emotions in ways that reflect the feeling and needs of others by showing care, understanding and respect for all children.
Be confident and involved learners – the service aims to teach children to use reflective thinking to consider why things happen and what can be learnt from these experiences by encouraging children to communicate and make visible their ideas, theories, collaborate with children and model reasoning, predicting and reflecting processes and language.
Be effective communicators – the service aims to teach children to convey and construct messages with purpose and confidence, including conflict resolution and following directions by modelling language and encouraging children to express themselves through language in a range of contexts and for a range of purposes including leading and following directions.

SERVICE INFORMATION

The service caters for children aged between 4 to 13 years of age or until commencement of high school. Kindy aged children are eligible to attend. During the term students attending Kathleen Mellor will be dropped to Kathleen Mellor at the end of our Before School Care session. Kindy staff will then walk children over to OSHC for the start of After School Care.

The service comes under the umbrella of the Governing council and has an OSHC committee made up of parents and a representative from the school staff. Meetings are also attended by the director, who report to the committee on the center’s needs and day to day issues.