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:
Getting the Balance Right Between Continuous Provision and Direct Teaching
The Impact of Covid-19 on Children’s Speech and Language Development
Supporting 2 Year Olds Communication and Language Development
We hope you will join us to step up this half-term.
Pauline
Our Journey into Early Years Online Training
A blog talking about our incredible journey over the past 5 months into launching our online training.
In August 2020 Growing Together developing early years launched our first ever early years online training. Our first event was our webinar ‘Childhood Trauma and Covid-19’. I was filled with nervousness as I logged onto the online webinar platform to do my first ever early years online training. After many hours of preparation, reading and more importantly practise and talking the topic through with anyone that would listen to me. Apologies to all of those friends who are not early years focused!
Early years online training was a completely different experience to my previous training I have delivered, which has been face to face and you can read peoples cues of engagement and easily get that interaction. For many of my first webinars, I felt like I was just chatting away to myself as I could not see anyone on the other side until we stopped to do activities; this was a new and strange feeling for myself.
I was so excited to receive some amazing reviews from our first series of webinars, which gave me the confidence to keep going. Susan and I are so excited by how much this early years online training has grown and developed and we really appreciate all of the feedback we have received as we continue to develop our webinars series and support professionals working in the early years sectors.
It is absolutely crazy to think that we now offer a range of early years online training as we are continuously releasing new webinars. Did you know since that very first webinar in the beginning of August 2020 we have run an amazing 58 webinars?! Even more incredible is that we have many more planned for the new year! You can check them out here by clicking on our link to our online training on the website.
In a year that has been very challenging for everyone around the world, as we social distance, lock down and spend more time on our own. This has really opened up a world for online training, and although we miss the opportunity of the physical coming together of training and having a chat over a cup of coffee or tea. We have seen the power and value of the early year’s community coming together online in our webinars, people pushing themselves out of their comfort zone and turning the videos or microphones on. Learning a new way to work, share ideas and connect with one another. What an amazing privilege we have had as a company to bring professionals across the early year’s community together in our online training.
We have spoken to people from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Omen, Malta, India, Dubia, Australia, Finland, America and China, just to name a few places. Wow, what an incredible opportunity we have had to bring people together who have a passion and care for early years through our online training all over the world. We would just like to take the opportunity to thank you for being a part of this online training journey with us. We can’t wait to continue to develop our online training for the early years more.