From the
Outside School Hours Care Director “A Year of Firsts” What a year! 2021 has been full of many exciting ‘firsts’ for our service and our families.
We entered the year with a new leadership team and welcomed our largest ever cohort of OSHC Preps. The end of Summer saw us swimming, rock climbing and programming robots, all before the start of school. Term 1 saw our staffing team grow from 15 to over 25 amazing, qualified educators! We focused heavily on professional development, and joined the Queensland Children’s Activity Network as part of their action research projects. Our focus was on reducing children’s reliance on adult input and structure, and increasing their independence and flexible thinking. Our biggest adventure to date came quite early in the year, as we increased our service to 200 places! This allowed us to enjoy April Vacation Care with over 300 separate families. We also partnered with Redeemer Sport to provide the first ever round of Vacation Care Sports Camps, enjoying two days of fun with 50+ attendees. Some of our smallest and youngest “OSHCies” took home the top prizes, proving that attitude is everything and keeping our educators on their toes. Even our fittest staff had a tough time keeping up with them! Term 2 started with the opportunity to open our doors to several other Lutheran services who joined us for a day to learn about our program and facilities. We watched our Preps gain confidence at both school and OSHC, and also had our Year 6 cohort run an entire After School Care program for the first time. Our children baked for the Helping Hands van, run by Our Saviour Lutheran Church in conjunction with Redeemer Lutheran College, and our staff joined in on several of the Friday night runs.
Winter Vacation Care brought another first, as we opened our fourth Vacation Care class with the Brisbane Chinese Language School. This program now takes 100 children every day throughout the holidays, with our partnership going from strength to strength as we approach our sixth year of working together. Art classes were introduced for the first time, and showed just how talented our children are. Our first class focused on the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who created portraits made up entirely of smaller paintings of objects such as fruits, vegetables or flowers. The children embraced his ideas wholeheartedly and drew some incredible self-portraits. The start of Term 3 meant the start of yet another new adventure – our very own STEM classes! We partnered with Engineering for Kids to offer coding and engineering classes, and had a plethora of brilliant, future engineers appear in our midst. September Vacation Care was filled with exciting Incursions, with more families joining our service than ever before. Sports Camps, art classes and Brisbane Chinese Language School lessons continued and we even had a visit from our friends at St Andrew’s Lutheran College OSHC (Tallebudgera). Now as we end 2021 with a service of 30 educators and over 500 enrolled children, we recognise the immense privilege of being a part of the lives of so many families. Each child is the reason we do what we do, and we are so blessed by the incredible humans that come through our doors every day. We hope that 2022 will be another year of growth and joy for our service and our families, and cannot wait to see where we can go together! MRS GEENA BARNES OUTSIDE SCHOOL HOURS CARE (OSHC) DIRECTOR
156 JUNIOR SCHOOL
REDEEMER REFLECTIONS 2021
