The NEW LOOK Childminding Best Practice Club is a special membership for childminders and other small early years settings. It is designed by outstanding childminders and early years professionals working in early years who understand first hand the challenges and demands of the role.
Each month members of the Childminding Best Practice Club receive a special ‘toolkit’ filled with childminding best practice information and resources. Members also receive other benefits like a 25% discount off other Kids To Go products and a special new member welcome pack.
What are the Childminding Best Practice Club Toolkits?
Designed to live up to their name the new look toolkits are full of easy to use resources and information. They are emailed directly to members each month making planning and continual professional development easy to keep on top of.
What is in the Childminding Best Practice Club Toolkits?
Each toolkit is split roughly into two sections. A, ‘My Learning Section,’ and a ‘My Curriculum,’ section.
My Learning
The ‘My Learning’ section contains lots of support and resources helping you to self evaluate your practice, learn and improve:
The continual professional development (my learning) section of the new look Childminding Best Practice Club toolkits has been revamped to help you not only continue to develop your work but also show proof of what you have been doing and why. It contains:
- A self-evaluation question to think about.
- A follow up training module to work through at your own pace, expanding on the self-evaluation question and giving you things to think about and try. If appropriate this also includes resources that you can use in your own setting to put your learning into practice.
- A chance to evaluate your learning proving that you have evaluated, implemented learning and the re-evaluated to show what impact the learning has had on your practice.
- A printable certificate to display to advertise your commitment to continual professional development.
- Further quick and easy CPD ideas for people that do not fancy the month’s training module or simply do not have more then ten minutes to spare.
My Curriculum
The ‘My Curriculum,’ section contains a wealth of support and resources to help you plan your curriculum:
In each ‘My Curriculum’ section there is 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:
Some children will have obvious needs that mean their next steps are easy to decide. 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.
For example if a child has learned the actions for, ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,’ and knows where his head and toes are his next step can be 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
How much does the Childminding Best Practice Club cost? It must be expensive!
Membership of the Club costs just £30 a year, that works out at just £2.50 a month for all your training, planning, information and resources. This makes it extremely affordable for all childminders and small early years settings. To make it even better as a member you also get a 25% discount off all other Kids To Go resources* such as the extremely popular, ‘Ultimate Childminding Checklist.’
(This offer excludes Forest Childcare Association Membership and Bundle Deals.)