Family first

PROMOTION

Family first

Early years development manager Julie Pearson celebrates the Alliance’s updated, family-focused learning offer

Julie is an experienced early year’s development manager at the Early Years Alliance who provides support, advice and training for early years providers and families

At the Alliance, we understand and value the importance of involving families in each step of children’s learning and development journey, with research demonstrating the impact of a positive home-learning environment on their future outcomes.

Celebrating the role of parents and carers as children’s first and most enduring educators, we continue to develop our unique family learning offer to make sure we’re providing families with support and guidance that really makes a difference. We’re therefore excited to launch an updated programme of online family learning events that are funded by the Department for Education (DfE).

Delivered online via Zoom, our updated family learning sessions are scheduled at a variety of times to meet the wide-ranging needs of busy families.

All sessions have a focus on supporting speech, language and communication, but while some sessions are solely geared towards this area, others weave it alongside different information.

Family Connects: One-off online events providing an opportunity to connect with other parents and carers on Zoom. Families will get the chance to learn about topics relevant to families and children aged 0-5, and share ideas in how to support children’s early education as well as each other.

Being Together, My Baby and Me: A five-week programme specially designed for families with babies, it combines advice on babies’ learning and development with postnatal support for new parents and carers.

There are five sessions in each programme, each looking at a different topic, with lots of opportunities for families to share and learn together.

Some of the topics covered include:

baby brain development and sensory play
early language and communication
positive mental health — especially by being outdoors (for key adults and babies)
keeping your baby safe
the importance of play

Confident communicators to tiny talkers: During this three-week programme, we discuss the importance of pre-verbal communication in creating confident communicators, as well as sharing tips and ideas about supporting communication at home to help children grow into ‘tiny talkers’. These sessions will have lots of fun interactions for children and babies with activities, songs and stories throughout. We encourage families to attend these sessions with their children.

Engaging with families about the home learning environment is a mandatory requirement within the Early Years Foundation Stage settings, thus making our family learning offer a great way of supporting families’ involvement – you could, for example, share links to these sessions on your online learning journal, through social media platforms or via email.

To find out more about the Alliance’s Family Learning offer, please visit Family Corner: bit.ly/U5FamilyCorner

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