Why We Are Stepping Up?

You may have noticed our current campaign step up this half-term and join one of the many options of continuous professional development that we offer. Whether that is one of our numerous recordings we now have available, meaning you can listen to them on a day and time that completely suits you. Heck, you can even pause me and come back to it! Did you know that once you have purchased one of your recording packages that download is yours forever? There are no time limits or even limits on how many times you watch it, it is truly yours forever and ever. Or perhaps you want to attend any one of the live events we are putting on this week. Did you know we are doing an incredible 14 live events? This is the week beginning 21st February 2022, we are sorry if this doesn’t coincide with your half-term; but we hope you might still be able to step up with us (on our Suffolk half-term!).

So, why? Good question why is this the week to do more webinars and really take the opportunity to invest in as much continuous professional development as we possibly can. We noticed after a year of doing our online training that we saw an increase of attendance in autumn and spring half-term. We took this as a message your were telling us as a company, we like to do continuous professional development in the half-terms. These have definitely been popular dates. We also appreciate that staffing in the early years sector is hard at the moment, we would even go as far as to say it is becoming a crisis. This makes term dates and training hard to release people during the day, or to exhausting after working so many hours during the day to then think about continuous professional development in the evenings. We really appreciate that we know that managing rotas, covering sickness and the many hats we wear means sometimes we can be to busy for continuous professional development.

As a company we passionately believe in the importance of engaging in training. So we hope this helps you out. By engaging in continuous professional development, it literally does help us to step up. We learn new things, we remember old ideas, we feel refreshed, renewed, we reflect on practise. All of this allows us to step up. To develop our role within our settings, to develop our professional practise and invest in ourselves. And in case you didn’t know it, you are most definitely worth it. So if you want to attend one of our 14 live events, check out what is on below:

• The New Revised Early Years Foundation Stage

• Promoting Oral Health in the Early Years

• Messy Early Mark-Makers

• Getting the Balance Right Between Continuous Provision and Direct Teaching

• De-Constructed Role-Play in the Early Years

• The Impact of Covid-19 on Children’s Speech and Language Development

• Understanding Your Curriculum

• Impact of Covid-19 on Children’s Mental Health

• Jargon Busters

• Language Development: Supporting Children with Stutters

• Let’s Talk Supervisions

• All About Pedagogy

• Supporting 2 Year Olds Communication and Language Development

• Managing Difficult Conversations with Parents

We hope you will join us to step up this half-term.

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)