The Home Learning Environment
Our amazing team of practitioners at Footsteps undergo continual training, mentoring and share best practice so that they can provide the best environment for children’s learning, development and well-being.
A recent course threw up some worrying statistics that they felt parents should be aware of. Did you know:
- One fifth of parents believed communication with babies is only beneficial after 3 months
- One in eight parents believe the responsibility for developing children’s communication skills lies outside the home
- One in eight children (receiving free school meals) don’t own a single book at home
At Footsteps we are very lucky to have a very strong supportive network, with parents and carers dedicated to developing communication skills. There are some great resources to help with ideas at home and we wanted to share some of these.
Children from every age take everything in, and even the smallest things you do with them can make a big difference. They love it when you chat, play and read with them, even when they’re too young to understand everything. Whatever the time and wherever you are, you can turn almost anything into a game.
A great place to start is with the Hungry Minds campaign – this will help encourage parents with simple, fun, easy activities they can use as part of their daily routine to support children’s early learning development.
www.hungrylittleminds.campaign.gov.uk
It also prompted us to start thinking about creating a parent’s information zone on our website with links to useful articles, information on Early Years educational objectives, approaches to learning, techniques for developing literacy and numeracy skills and anything else our parents would find useful.
We will be developing this over the coming months so please do let us know if there are any resources you would particularly like to see.
