A tale of two toddler groups

Catapulted into the crazy world of motherhood twelve years ago, I needed to get out of the house for the sake of my extremely ‘active’ toddler and for my own sanity! So I started attending toddler groups with my friends and discovered just how many there were, of all shapes and sizes, all over Cardiff. Like some massive underground organisation, its secret activities had gone completely unnoticed before I became a mum.

My first toddler group

I quickly settled into our local church toddler group and made myself as useful as I could. A small brethren inner-city church in an area heavily populated by elderly people and students, the toddler group was run by a team of retired ladies and headed up by their church worker’s wife, Siân.

We had a regular group of 15 or so mums and met in the church hall on Wednesday mornings. An hour of free-play was followed by a ‘tea-party’ for the children at tables at one end of the room and then a short song-time, sat on the floor at the other. We used a custom-made nursery rhyme book to enable each child to select a song for us all to sing. The Bible stories were acted out using Action Man and his Duplo Disciples! When Siân left for mid-Wales, I was bequeathed the Action Man and began a new career as a toddler group leader.

My second group

Involvement in my second group started when we moved out to the suburbs. Rhiwbina Baptist Church Toddler Group meets on Thursday afternoons. Up to 40 carers attend each week and, although coffee is served to the adults in the main church hall, the children’s refreshments and song-time are in the nursery hall.

I took on responsibility for providing a craft activity for the 20 or so older children in a side room and, over several years, built up a file of craft ideas and a cupboard full of ‘bits and pieces’. I have recently passed on the baton to someone else and the craft is moving into the main hall to encourage parental involvement. I hope to share some of these craft ideas with you in the future.

A high proportion of the adults in the group are childminders and grandparents as the mums work, and so the Positive Parenting course, ‘Time Out for Parents’, planned for the autumn will be held in the evenings in the local Starbucks coffee shop. Recent changes to the team of young mums who run the group mean that we have put aside time to go through the ‘Building Blocks’ training course and, of course, I will be encouraging them to attend the Playtime Conference in Luton!

Through Playtime I have come to appreciate the wide variety encompassed by the term ‘toddler group’. Differences in the size and demographic of the groups, when, where and how sessions are organised, the leadership team, and the local area, result in no two groups looking the same. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for me as Playtime seeks to support all toddler group leaders of church-based groups. I’m looking forward to it!

Fiona Burt

Last Updated 27 July 2009