Continual Professional Development is something that all childminders should do. The best childminders know that however you good you are, there is always more you can learn and new ideas you can try.
Remember that CPD is not just about what courses you attend and what new qualifications you gain. In fact, those more formal CPD activities should account for only a small part of an ongoing commitment from the best childminders to improve their skills, knowledge and experience.
CPD is about trying new activities, it is about making small changes to how you run your practice and about looking at child development from new perspectives. Trying new things means that you will never feel stuck in a rut. Doing, not studying, new ideas while you are on the job is what will allow you to grow as an individual and genuinely improve your childminding practice.
Recording the training courses and other CDP activities you do is a great way to keep track of your training so that you can show your Ofsted inspector what you are doing. Start a log book and each time you complete a CPD activity, you should make a record of how it went and what you learned from it so that if you tried the activity again you would have an idea what you might do differently.
Membership to the Childminding Best Practice Club includes a log book for recording your training, both formal courses and the new activities that you try.
Join the Childminding Best Practice Club
Joining the Childminding Best Practice Club is making a commitment to quality and trying new things. As well as the monthly themed packs of activities, each pack also contains suggestions for 8 continual professional development (CPD) ideas that you can do to improve your practice. It’s great value at only £2.50 per month.
Each issue of the monthly activity pack includes:
Good behaviour through good communication skills – each issue has a suggested activity you can do to promote good behaviour
Themed printable arts and crafts projects come with each pack. The craft activities and activity pages all have templates and full instructions. The activities are adaptable to younger children or to older ones you may look after in the holidays.
Maths printable activity sheet – each issue has a maths printable to promote counting, shapes and space
Colouring page – each issue has a unique, original colouring page based on the issue’s theme
Outdoor play idea
Indoor fun – new ideas you may not have tried before
Simple science activity – to help children to better understand their world
Invitation to play idea
British values or seasonal diversity awareness craft (with templates) or activity idea to help you celebrate multicultural holidays with childminded children
An idea from the past – the EYFS wasn’t written in a vacuum. Challenge yourself to explore and put into practice some childcare ideas from the past. Understanding how people thought about childcare in the past can help you to better understand how we do things today. And to see that there are alternative ways to approach childcare than just the EYFS.
Sign up for my free quarterly Childminding Best Practice Newsletter – great for new ideas
I write a quarterly newsletter that is totally free for childminders. It contains business tips, legislation updates, links to useful documents as well as a few laughs. Please sign up using the orange sign up box on my website – there is a link at the top of this page that says ‘newsletter signup’.
