Playgroup is a place where parents come with their children to connect and play in a safe environment.
Playgroups great for children, it gets them out of the house socialising with other children because they come from a young age, two up to about five, they get an opportunity to play with other children, learn social skills, be out in the community.
One of the greatest resources we have is other parents talking to them, sharing a journey. If there's a facilitator there, you've also got extra support there. So it really does help with your parenting confidence.
We have Community playgroups, Supported playgroups, and we run some Activation playgroups.
Community playgroups run by the community. It's generally parents that have got together and maybe they've followed on from their new baby group and they've decided to keep in contact and meet up weekly.
Activation program is to start a community playgroup. So we'll come in with a facilitator and we'll help for a short time. We'll get them set up, make sure they understand how a playgroup runs and how to get it organised and then we'll transition them to running on their own.
The Playgroups that run across our municipality, we run them at a number of times. Some are in the morning, some are in the afternoon, so we can capture everybody who'd like to come. They run from community centres, schools, you can even run one from a park if you want to. It's really wide.
For our Supported playgroups which have an eligibility criteria, it's families with a healthcare card, Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander families, refugee families, families that have been engaged with enhanced maternal child health nurses. Anybody who needs a little bit extra support.
Part of our Supported playgroup is an in-home support program to assist parents in the home with building their parenting confidence. There's no cost for the Supported playgroups but the Community playgroups often have a small fee. This will cover things like art and craft materials.
Parents can visit the website and follow the links to the playgroup. They can call us, email us, and someone will get back to them.
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