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Infant/Toddler Group Care

Primary Care

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Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

• Explain PITC’s definition of primary care and discuss how having a primary care teacher assigned to each child benefits the child, parent and teacher.

• Describe how a primary care teacher and a secondary care teacher can work as a team when the child is in care longer than the primary care teacher’s work day or when the primary care teacher is busy with another of her primary children.

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Close, Caring Relationships:

• Support a child’s social-emotional well-being;

• Are at the heart of high quality care;

• Provide trust, comfort and security to children;

• Allow the primary caregiver to make an emotional investment in each infant.

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PITC Essential Policies and Practices

Small Group Sizes

Primary Care

Continuity of Care

Personalized Care

Inclusion of Infants with Disabilities and other special needs

Cultural Responsiveness

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Primary Care

Together in Care: Meeting the Intimacy Needs of Infants and Toddlers in Groups, 1992.

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Primary Care• Supports a strong relationship between the child and an adult;

• Means one adult is primarily responsible for most of the child’s care;

• Supports a child’s need for stability with the consistent attention from one adult;

• Is particularly crucial to children with special needs.

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Primary Care• Allows for partnerships between a caregiver and family as well as specialists working with individual children.

• Supports children’s identity and cultural connection to the family.

• Happens naturally in small family child care.

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Small Group Discussion: How does your program currently assign children and teachers to groups?

Are teachers responsible for doing routines (diapering, feeding, napping) with a small number of children, or all the children in the group?

How and when are care teacher assignments made? • When the child is enrolled? • Based on which group has a vacancy? • According to family culture or primary language?

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Looking at current practices…

What is working well?

For the child?

For the family?

For the teachers?

What is not working well?

For the child?

For the family?

For the teachers?

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Do you need to make any changes in child/care teacher assignment process?

• What are the changes?

• What do you need to make the changes?

• When will you begin?

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Considerations in Assigning Primary Infant Care Teachers

• In dyads, review the hand out: Assigning Primary Infant Care Teachers

• Which suggestions from the lists would you like to try in your program?

• What will your next steps be?

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Revisit Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

• Explain PITC’s definition of primary care and discuss how having a primary care teacher assigned to each child benefits the child, parent and teacher.

• Describe how a primary care teacher and a secondary care teacher can work as a team when the child is in care longer than the primary care teacher’s work day or when the primary care teacher is busy with another of her primary children.