Meeting Your Needs

Returning to work/study

At Sunshine Childcare we understand the pressures on parents who are returning to work or study. We know you have high expectations regarding the care of your child and we aim to surpass these expectations on a daily basis by providing a warm, caring play and learning environment where all your child’s needs are taken care of including meals and nappies. All you need to do is provide two changes of clothes and a hug good-bye… we will take care of everything else they need while you are fulfilling your vocation.

Prior to enrolment talk to your peers and colleagues and get information or recommendations from them regarding different types of childcare.

Make sure to check out a variety of centres to get the feel for what works best for your family – remember to check out both Sunshine Centres as while they are under the same company umbrella, they cater to different needs.

Enquire well in advance of when you know you are needing care to ensure there is a space, especially for infants, as spaces are limited and fill quickly.

Remember, you can phone as many times as you like throughout the day to check on your child and see how they are doing. We understand this process can be harder for you than your child!

Support for extended whanau

Visitors to the centre are always welcome! - All visitors to our building are required to sign in and sign out to ensure we are able to keep a record of who has been in our centre.

Court Orders - We also ask on enrolment for you to provide us details of any court orders that are in place and we make sure that this information is handled confidentially and sensitively, but that the people who need to know are aware of this.

Picking up a child - All people who are not known to our staff that are coming to pick up a child are required to show ID and to be on the child’s pick up list. We understand that in some situations, ‘things happen’ and your usual person may not be available to pick up your child. In this situation, we encourage you to ring us and give permission for someone different to pick up your child; we will ask them for ID on pick-up to confirm they are who they say they are.

Online Presence - We are also sensitive to the need to keep children safe, and that may mean that your child is not visible online through our website, Facebook or any other forms of digital or print media. Please let us know of this when you sign the enrolment form.

“Bridge” - We are able to act as a bridge, where one parent picks up and another will drop off reducing the stress and conflict in the life of a child.

Opportunities to socialise  

We offer a variety of sessions from 3 hours to full day and we are flexible about when these are.

We provide fantastic opportunities for children to socialise and learn through play which allows parents/whanau to have some peaceful respite from the demands of parenthood for a few hours each day. We provide a daily learning programme where child-led, spontaneous and teacher-initiated experiences are woven like a whariki; to support children’s evolving skills, attitudes and the dispositions that are essential for being confident life-long learners.

Preparing for school

In each room, at both our Vickery St and Sunshine Ave centres, we target educational experiences that promote foundation skills in memory, listening, oral language, mathematical concepts of colour, size, numbers, body and spatial awareness, fostering positive dispositions such as persistence, risk taking, friendliness, social behaviours of taking an interest and showing curiosity, testing, making mistakes, helping....all necessary for success in later learning.

Readiness for school is woven through every activity and experience, from learning about science outside in the sandpit, mathematics by climbing trees, literacy through acting out stories and oral language through show and tell, or the specific interest or learning experience each child participates in. Children learn best when they are excited or interested about something, and learning occurs in their own time, in their own way and at their own pace, "a tona wa" (Te Whariki, 2017). Throughout our planning we seek your aspirations for your child and plan learning specifically to ensure positive outcomes are met for your child.

We focus on positive dispositions to learning and emotional-social skills so tamariki have the skills to learn in the school setting. Both Sunshine centres create a Mini Portfolio or document which has strong links to the Primary School curriculum that the child takes to their new entrant teacher as they start school. This gives the school knowledge about our tamariki and an understanding of who they are before their first day.