Practitioner Story: ECP Bedford Children Centres

 We visited one of the ECP Children's Centres in Bedford to meet some of the families using EasyPeasy. After a fun session building towers with our hands and imagining far-off safaris, we caught up with the Centre's Manager Tracy Fardell to chat about how the centres were using EasyPeasy at the moment. 

What’s your role, and what’s your current focus?

I’m Tracy, I’m the Children’s Centre Teacher for the Children’s Centres in Bedford Borough. A lot of my remit is around school readiness and preparing our children to be independent. 

You’ve used EasyPeasy for the past year. How have you used it?

Across the Children’s Centres, what we are always trying to encourage is parent- child interaction. We’ve found that the EasyPeasy games were so good for the parents; they gave the parents confidence and they could watch the videos over and over again and then try it out at home. It didn’t matter if the game didn’t work the first time, they could go back and try it again. The often come back and tell us “Oh, we played that same game that we played last week, but we did it differently this week.” It’s so good to get that feedback from our parents. Whilst we can be there to help  parents interact and play with their children in the Children’s Centres, with EasyPeasy we know it’s going on at home too. 

Do you see any impact on your children?

The games on EasyPeasy help with all the developmental areas. They’re helping the children to become independent and it’s encouraging them to talk. 

We can direct parents to EasyPeasy games and say "try this game for this skill", and quite often, parents come back and tell us that their child is improving...this is what we're looking for. All those skills that children need for school come through in the EasyPeasy games,  so it’s a really valuable tool!