Activities for parents and children

Good Start Great Start (GSGS) is a six-week parenting programme, developed by Middlesex University, which targets parents with children aged three years and over. The objectives are to enhance:

• parental sense of competence
• family involvement in transition to school
• transition readiness

The BEYA Hub rolled out GSGS across its member settings. Practitioners reported improvements in children’s readiness for transition for school and in the quality of home learning. Parents reported improvements in their child’s confidence, independence and creativity.

Find out more on the GSGS website.

Early Words Together at Two is a National Literacy Trust programme, designed to improve the home learning environments of families of two-year-olds. It's a practitioner-led programme, designed for Private, Voluntary and Independent early years providers (PVIs), schools and children’s centres. Both parents and children attend up to five activity sessions. Parents are supported to work on a range of different activities that are known to have a positive impact on later educational attainment.

The BEYA Hub ran the one-day training course for 30 practitioners, 19 of whom then delivered the programme in their settings.

Parents who took part reported:

• having a better understanding of their child’s language development needs
• being more creative when talking and reading to their child
• being more likely to read stories and make story telling more interesting

Find out more on the National Literacy Trust website, or watch this short video, produced by BEYA, in which a practitioner talks about his experience of the programme.

The Wandle Early Years Hub developed and delivered 'Fantastic Twos' - a six-week programme run through children’s centres, which targetted children who were not in early years provision.

The overall aim of the programme was to improve take-up of funded two-year-old places. Parents and children attended together, and the sessions set out to:

• prepare children and families for the transition to nursery
• identify children in need of additional support
• ensure children made good progress against their development goals
• help parents to experience what a nursery is like and see how their child responds

The practitioner-led activities focussed on the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) prime areas of learning. Parents were provided with ideas and materials to encourage them to do activities at home with their children.

"I didn't send my daughter to nursery when she was two, but I came to Fantastic Twos with her. I wanted to be together with her. With Fantastic Twos, I loved it because I was able to enjoy spending time with her, watching her play and make friends. I could see how she was doing with other children - different than just being at home. She's going to nursery now. She's three. She loves it."

- Parent

Read DDA's case study about Fantastic Twos or watch the video below to hear Hannah Skaife, from the Wandle Early Years Hub, talk more about the programme.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic (and in an extension to their original work plan) the Wandle Early Years Hub ran a series of infant wellbeing webinars, aimed at both practitioners and parents.

Recorded versions of these webinars are available for free on the hub's fantastic new Nurturing Future Minds website.

You'll also find a collection of other, freely-available resources to help parents, caregivers and professionals support the social and emotional learning and wellbeing of children aged 0–5. This includes practical advice, activity ideas, accredited training and research articles. There are also resources to support adult mental health for parents, carers and professionals.

For the hubs, the importance of home-learning during a child's early years was brought into even sharper focus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One member setting of the Wandle Early Years Hub focussed their efforts on delivering the EYFS through guided home-learning for children who were no longer able or comfortable to attend nursery in-person during the pandemic.

During this time, many nurseries furloughed staff as children's attendance dropped. By contrast, this nursery in Wandsworth retained its full team in order to:

• plan personalised activities based on individual children’s needs, using materials and objects which parents had at home
• order resources from educational suppliers such as books, Makaton signs and sensory items where a particular need was identified
• talk to parents and children on the phone to keep communication open and to reach out to families as a familiar, important adult

The above activities directly contributed to:

• parents and children developing new skills and confidence around home learning
• a deepened sense of community between families and staff who are part of the setting
• an increase in parental engagement, with many sending photographs and feedback of different activities being successfully completed
• parents being proactive in asking for support and further advice

Given the benefits that they have seen, the nursery intends to continue this approach in future, by combining on-site learning with online home-learning sessions for local families.

The COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown in March 2020 provided an opportunity for the hubs to explore new ways to engage families. This included using social media and messaging platforms like YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. Once engaged, parents were supported to use online learning resources including videos and bespoke software.

The Wandle Early Years Hub created a timetable through Facebook, where activities for parents and children were uploaded every day. Children's centre staff also began to run sessions for families via Microsoft Teams, for example, song time, story time and messy play sensory activities.

"Many parents said that seeing their child's key person on YouTube was really exciting for the child!"

- Early years practitioner

EasyPeasy is an application that sends ideas for games to parents of pre-school children, to encourage play-based learning at home.

Parents receive a weekly text message direct from EasyPeasy, which links to videos of example games that they can play with their child. The games target skills within the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) areas of learning. They also get tips and advice about learning through play.

The Working Together Hub provided free access to EasyPeasy. This had been found to be an effective tool before the COVID-19 pandemic, but was invaluable during the national lockdown in March 2020, when many children were not attending nursery as usual.

Find out more on the EasyPeasy website.