New Year, New Focus

Often this time of the year we find ourselves reflecting on the previous year and vowing to new years resolutions, change and a better year this year. I will let you into a secret, I have never been very good at new years resolutions, this year I will join the gym or any of those typical resolutions we feel the pressure to make. But when I was an early year’s managers one of the things that I loved to at the end of each new year and beginning of the next was to take the opportunity to reflect. To consider how much we had achieved in the last year, the amazing moments, we have had and what is next for the setting; where do we want to go?

I am sure there are many managers up and down the country thinking about their settings, the challenges of the past years, the achievements and the where next? New year is a fabulous time to refocus to think about developing those plans for the next year that are going to help your setting grow and develop. Carefully considering the intent, why you want to do things in the next year, to support staff development, to support children’s learning and development or to focus on well-being whatever it will be. And also, the implementation how are you going to do this to ensure that you have an impact – you make a difference to your setting.

As a company we can help you to re-focus this new year to support your setting in their journey. We offer audits, hourly consultancy visits and a wide range of face to face or online continuous professional development for staff. Over 2021 it has been incredible to have met so many practitioners face to face and virtually. We are passionate as a company about inspiring practitioners and working closely with you to develop your settings to improve practise to support children and their families. We cannot wait to support more of you as we move in 2022.

We have developed a resource for you a CPD planner that can be purchased here, to help you plan out your CPD for 2022.

Happy New Year!

Pauline

Where Next for Growing Together?

2020 has been a mixed year for many people, a year full of challenges, disappointments and uneasiness; but it has also been a time for communities and people to come together. To support one another, talk to our neighbours, be good Samaritans in the course of a pandemic. 2020 will certainly be a year to be remembered, and it is okay to feel a sense of loss and annoyance for events within the past year. However, I want to reflect on some of the positives as a company; we launched our online early years training in August 2020 and what an incredible success it has been. (You can click here to view events for 2021). We got an allotment and connected with nature as directors together. And we also launched an incredible Parent and Child Nature Group in Brakey Woods in Hoxne.

I look back at how our new little company has grown and developed in the last year and it makes me excited to continue to develop, grow and see what is to come in the next year. We have some exciting visions and plans; including launching more online early years training events and we have several new events already planned for January and February 2021. Including the following:

·         Tools for Evaluating Practise

·         Supporting Children’s Listening, Attention and Understanding

·         Supporting Children with English as an Additional Language

·         Using Observations for Planning

·         Taking Phase One Phonics Outdoors

·         Bringing Mathematics Outdoors in the Early Years

We have developed these webinars alongside the questions, feedback and discussions we have had with practitioner over the past few months and are super excited that we are able to expand and offer more online early years training in the new year. In addition, of course to the ones we have already been running!

We also run our first ever Early Years Practitioners Virtual Conference, an event that was completely online for us to connect as an early year’s community. It was an amazing day and we have received such incredible feedback; such as “Fantastic opportunity to meet with other EY professionals and gather ideas to improve practice in a range of areas.” Where attendees also responded with saying they considered the event to be good value for money, we are so happy to facilitate this and cannot wait to run more virtual conferences in the new year, including:

·         Virtual Conference Laying the Foundations for Reading and Writing – 2nd January 2021 (booking available by clicking here)

·         Early Years Practitioners Virtual Conference – Easter 2021

·         Early Years Leaders Virtual Conference – Summer 2021

·         Early Years Practitioners Virtual Conference – Autumn 2021.

As a company we are passionate about supporting children and practitioners to develop a connection with nature, with endless benefits to our health and well-being. We will be continuing our Monday morning Brakey Wood Parent and Child Nature Group and hope by the summer to be able to run an afternoon group too. We can see the demand and importance for these events for parents and children to connect with nature but also one another outside, especially in the light of everything we have experienced in the past year. We also are excited to continue with our allotment journey as directors, to share this progress and transformation with you and learn together as we connect with each other in a different way and hopefully inspire you to connect as well.

We are even thinking about launching an early years Eco-Warrior programme, where you can have access to videos, resources and materials to help teach our very young children about the importance of looking after the natural world around us. We believe as a company that children are the future and we need to invest in them, in order to support their learning in looking after the environment and world around us.

On the 31st January 2021 we are also launching our staff meeting series, which is 20 short videos (ranging from 5 to 20 minutes) on different topics with accompanying resources to do a follow up activity or discussion. This is designed to help you introduce continuous professional development into your staff meetings without having to worry about time to get them ready. We are really excited to be launching this and have nearly finished recording.

We cannot wait for 2021 to start we are sure it is going to be an amazing year full of new opportunities!

By Pauline Milsted (Director of Growing Together)