Family Day Care Diaries Purchasing GuideUpdated 2 months ago
What is the difference between all the Family Day Care Diaries?
The Family Day Care Diaries have been developed over time to meet the needs of different educators and schemes.
The original Family Day Care Diary has combined with the Compliance Checklist diary for a more detailed checklist every day to make sure most compliances are being covered on a daily basis, eg. Health and Safety, Sleep times and checks, Nappies and toileting, UV ratings, and Meals. For some of the things that are not covered, we developed our duplicate books. The ultimate compliance tools are this Checklist Diary along with the FDC Compliance Books to be completely covered for compliance.
For programming and reflection, we developed our Weekly Programming and Reflection Diary (except QLD Kindy Program). These are designed for the educator to professionalise, yet simplify your workload, and your ‘Creative Thinking Program’ can be displayed each day, either as it unfolds or it can be used to pre-plan your week along with your daily visual displays for parents. With your Weekly Programs and Reflections on open spreads, it enables you to open this book at any time and view each week at a glance and follow up on future programs using your notes. Educators will often purchase this diary along with one of the compliance diaries together. For your Outdoor Program, use the Central Outdoor Weekly Programming and Reflection Diary.
To support you in applying and recording sustainable practices, we have the Our Sustainable Year Wall Calendar. The Culturally Responsive Year Calendar has been designed to meet the discussion notes in the 2021 NQF ALF Update. The recent review focused on Approved Learning Frameworks and highlighted changes to strengthen the connection between Learning Frameworks and the National Quality Standard in Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing and moving from cultural competence to cultural responsiveness.
To help you capture and record Individual Observations, our Individual Observations Duplicate Book works in conjunction with the Weekly Programming and Reflection Diary and provides duplicate pages, so your records are filed where they need to be. We also have a My Amazing Year - Portfolio Learning Journal for Children to help you capture their progress throughout the year.
Not to be forgotten are the FDC Co-ordinators whose busy schedule of home visits, approvals, and professional development of educators must be documented as well. For this, we created the Family Day Care Co-ordinator Diary, Home Visit Report Duplicate book, the Excursion Evaluation and Approval Duplicate book (to be used with the Educators' Excursion Risk Management Plan Duplicate book) and the Visitor Sign-In Duplicate Book.
We also have a diary for the Educational Leader role.
What is the purpose of the duplicate books?
The duplicate and triplicate books have been developed with the educator, the scheme, and the families in mind. They are designed to cut down paperwork, photocopying, and emailing while ensuring that the relevant records and copies of these records are kept and held in the appropriate areas as required by the Regulations and the Law. We developed separate books with enough room and sets of duplicates to cover all of the requirements for up to a year in most cases.
They are designed to cover the regulations and the law for each of the areas that the educator is required to document. We identified these as:
Weekly Attendance and Sign-in Duplicate Book (50 sets)
Administration of Medication Record Triplicate Book (20 sets)
Incident, Injury, Trauma and Illness Record Triplicate Book (20 sets)
Excursion Risk Management Plan Duplicate Book (20 sets)
And for the FDC Co-ordinator:
Family Day Care Co-ordinator Excursion Evaluation and Approval Duplicate Book A4 (20 sets).
Family Day Care Co-ordinator Home Visit Compliance Duplicate Book A4 (2 pages duplicated) (20 sets).
Visitor Sign-In Duplicate Book Book A4 (20 sets).
Do I need to buy both the FDC Compliance Diary and the Weekly Programming and Reflection Diary?
Many educators do as the Compliance Diaries (Compliance Checklist Diary) covers the business side of things, and the Weekly Programming and Reflection Diaries cover the educational side of compliance.
Many educators have different ways of doing their record keeping and programming, it all depends on what you or your scheme already have in place and what your priorities are.