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Easy Peasy is creating new content with any practitioner during lockdown.
We know how tough practitioners are finding the separation from their little students, and how helpless many of us feel in getting activity and learning support to our parent community.
Easy Peasy is creating new content with educators, to add into the existing Easy Peasy app.
This will enable activities and games to be shared directly (and securely) to a group of parents and carers. Practitioners can choose whether this is visible just to their setting or more widely.
Why are we doing this?
Many of our partners - from schools to children's charities - are grappling to teach their curriculum or deliver their programmes at a distance. For the early years, this is a trickier challenge area than for older groups who are able to self-study or follow instruction without help. As we know from the classroom, early years learning is predominantly through play and human interaction.
Our new initiative with educators is being done to support the ‘new normal’. Who would have thought that, overnight, national early years distance learning would even be possible?
This is a situation we have never found ourselves in before. There are many issues and worries but at the same time, we believe it is an opportunity to re-imagine new ways to help children learn and grow in the home.
Our first practitioner content partner
We have loved trialling this new style of working with a nursery setting based in Cambridge.
This setting is already subscribed to the app, but as COVID-19 forced families into lockdown, the Nursery Manager started thinking how she could expand the activity ideas being sent to parents.
She decided to integrate with the existing Easy Peasy app and collaborated with us to create content for her setting. Her activities are being sent out weekly to her nursery families. Their parents will receive these alongside EasyPeasy's catalogue of evidence-based game ideas.
How did we work with Cambridge Nursery?
The process for creating activities is simple.
- The Nursery Manager filmed herself doing activities at home and wrote tips and advice on how parents could play the activity with their child.
- She decided to do 4 activities - songs and games that she would usually do in her sessions.
- She used her phone camera to record herself, and then sent us the recordings.
- We asked her to fill out a bit of detail to help parents use the activity at home.
- Our team added the four activities onto the EasyPeasy platform.
- She had a look and gave the thumbs up.
Our partner practitioner feedback
Our Nursery Manager has found the experience valuable and we have loved her creative and go-getter approach, along with the activities she chose to do.
"I felt using EasyPeasy has given me the opportunity to have direct, easy and ongoing contact with parents through this difficult lockdown time. Having the comments section of the app really makes me feel that I am making a difference and actually helping make things easier for them while we’re not around.
What a wonderful experience it was to work together!”
How to get involved
If you are a teacher or run an early years programme and are interested in adding your resources to our platform to share with your families, or with the wider EasyPeasy community, please get in touch with Jane Bradbury at jane@easypeasyapp.com.
