“My morning starts at 6:30am and my first task of the day is to feed my two cats ‘Mr Sox’ and ‘Lucky’. I then eat my breakfast and quickly clean around the house and make sure my daughter is ready for college. After dropping her off at college, I head to the Peter Pan Centre.

There is a daily safety checklist for all the Specialist Practitioners to follow, so this is our first job on arrival, to know which opening and closing procedure we are responsible for each day. The nursery room is then set up for the children, including getting our key child’s file, PECs (picture exchange cards) and toys of interest ready for the morning session. PECs are a communication system that helps children who are preverbal or nonverbal make requests and gives a visual prompt to help children who might find it difficult to understand words.

Upon arrival at the Centre, we welcome the children and chat to parents. We always need to be updated on their child’s medical health and general wellbeing since their last session with us.

Once in the nursery room we sing our welcome song together. This signals that the session has begun. We have lots of fun with the children, which always includes more singing, playing inside and out and exploring the sens

ory room with it’s interactive floor. Each child has different personal targets, physiotherapy targets and speech and language targets and throughout the session we work through them with our key child.

We always give feedback to the parents at the end of each session and once we have said goodbye to the children it is time to clean the room and prepare it for the afternoon before eating our lunch.

The afternoon session replicates the morning and once all children and parents have left, we clean the room, including all the toys, ready for the next day. Once all the cleaning is complete we then have paperwork to do, updating our children’s files with targets, highlighting the children’s journals and adding photographs we have taken during a session.

At 5pm it’s home time and time do another clean sweep around my house and pop in a load or two of washing, feed the cats and then it’s time to sit down with a cup of tea and relax.”

Michelle Hollins, Senior Specialist Practitioner.