NEW LOOK Childminding Best Practice Club (Yearly Subscription)

Special Offer: Join before January 2024 and you will also receive a free copy of the 2024 Calendar and Planner

Quick description:

The Childminding Best Practice Club is unique. Designed by outstanding childminders to support other childminders, members receive:

• Monthly Childminding Best Practice Toolkits emailed straight to your inbox. Every Childminding Best Practice Club toolkit is divided into roughly two sections; a 'your curriculum' section and a 'your learning' section, each providing lots of information and support.
• A 25% discount* off other Kids To Go resources 
• 'New Members Welcome Pack'. 

More Information:

Each month you will receive a Childminding Best Practice Club toolkit containing:

Support and resources to help you plan your curriculum:

If you have an Ofsted inspection you will need to show your inspector that your curriculum is 'coherently planned and sequenced.' You will also need to demonstrate that, 'It builds on what children know and can do, towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for their future learning.'

The new look Childminding Best Practice Club toolkits contain a special section dedicated to helping you plan your curriculum. In it you will find a planning grid based on the monthly theme. This sets an overall objective for the theme (the intent) and breaks down the children's learning into stages so that you can chose activities that match your children's stage of development.

The stages themselves are broken down into sections:

•    The learning intent (what you want children to learn)

•    The implementation (how you will help the children learn, for example suggested activities you can try.)

•    The impact. Things to look for that show what the children have learned.

Once the children are secure in one stage they can move to the next.

Help setting children's next steps:

Your inspector will also want you to show how you, 'assess what children know, understand and can do, as well as taking account of their interests and dispositions to learn (characteristics of effective learning), and how practitioners use this information to plan children’s next steps in learning and to monitor their progress.'

(Quote taken from the Early Years Inspection Handbook 2023)

Some children will have obvious needs that mean their next steps are easy to decide. These children also tend to be the easier ones to talk about with an inspector simply because their needs are clear. However, you may have children that you find trickier to decide next steps for.  In this case you can use the planning grid to decide a useful next step to give the child and be able to talk about the inspector with. For example, for an ‘All About Me,’ topic you might say to the inspector something like:

“We are working on an ‘All About Me,” topic at the moment. Billy has learned the actions for,  ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,’ and knows where his head and toes are. Now we are working with the playdough to help him learn and reinforce what his eyes, nose and mouth are called."

Activities, and resources to help implement each child's learning:

Every month the Childminding Best Practice Club toolkits contain a selection of activities and crafts (with templates where necessary) to help you deliver the theme to your children. 

Instead of all of these activities being craft based the new look Childminding Best Practice Club toolkits have a selection of different activities, for example there may be:

• a special language activity aimed at teaching and reinforcing vocabulary, 
• a playdough based activity with printable resources to help develop fine motor control and hand strength while learning about the theme, 
• a craft activity to help encourage creativity or following instructions (based on the type of craft!) With templates where necessary.

The selection will vary each month depending on the theme and will help you build a broad and balanced curriculum. Each activity will come with printable resources or templates as necessary.

Additional activities to help cover things like schema play, characteristics of effective learning, diversity and British Values

As not every area of learning may be naturally covered by the month's theme other separate sections are included in the curriculum part of the toolkit each month.

• Monthly ideas to try with children under the age of two. A lot of the training and available ideas out there are aimed at children aged three years and older. This can be frustrating for childminders who very often have younger children. This section has been introduced to help combat that! Every month there are some fabulous ideas for you to try out with the very youngest children in your care. For example ideas surrounding schemas.
• Monthly diversity/British Values Activity. Each toolkit features a monthly diversity or British Values activity for you to do with your children. Learn about things like Diwali, St George's Day, recycling, Easter and Christmas.
• Monthly planning sheet with ideas to help cover areas not covered in the themed section. For example count and colour sheets to help children practice their maths skills.

Additional resources included in each monthly toolkit may include things like:

• Original illustrated stories to print and share with your children and there families.
• Printable playdough mats
• Printable games
• Printable display resources
• Printable activity sheets or colouring sheets

Support and resources helping you to self evaluate your practice, learn and improve

During your inspection how will you demonstrate how you 'evaluate (your) service and strive for continuous improvement?'