Recruiting & Training volunteers
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As with the playroom our initial advice would also be don’t get too hung with recruiting a team straight away.
Me and Warwick spent 6 months playing with and learning the approach with Henry before we decided to go full time and started to look for volunteers.
It is really important that you are confident with, and believe, in what you are doing, recruiting and training people is a really big deal.
When you are ready to recriut, here are a few ideas for places to advertise:
- play groups and mothers and toddlers aiming at parent’s whose children will be starting nursery/school and will have some free time.
- School newsletters
- Local shops and suprermarkets
- Local 6th forms, colleges and universitys (especially psychology courses)
- Gum tree or other local on line
- Local newspapers in recruitment section (under part-time heading)
Posters usually work well with a photo of your child and a little bit of information eg Henry loves dinosaurs and chase games. We educate Henry at home using a play, child centred approach. If you have at least 4 hours to spare a week and would like to help a little boy reach his full potential please contact……. No training necessary just a positive and caring approach!
When we did find people that were interested we did give them a volunteer information pack. We found that it was important that people fully understood what they were interested in as it seemed to save time later on. If it would help, you can always contact me for a copy and adapt it for yourselves.
Training for new comers is different for everyone however in the beginning a good place to start is letting them watch you or another person playing with your child. It is helpful if you can watch with them you can then point out techniques and explain what is going on.
Giving your trainee specific things to read and watch is really helpful, especially videos of your child playing with you or others. If you would like more advice about what to show your trainees please feel free to contact me.
Here are a few tips for starting off the new comer in the playroom:
- you would normally be present to start with at the beginning of your programme as a way for them to meet your child (its also nice if they seen them in and around the house before this too).
- Then you would have them go in for a short time, say 20 minutes.
- The best way I found was to tell the newcomer to simply do everything the child was doing and to have fun.
- It is also crucial that you observe.
- Once they have been in the training comes from their sessions. For example, ‘Did you notice that when you were playing with the ball Henry turned his back and started playing on his own, if you see his connection level drop like this you start to join and joining is……”