One nursery on how its #keepintouch campaign is supporting families

As soon as the partial closure measures were enforced, we saw our role instantly diverge into two distinct paths: one, supporting those families who have continued to come in to us, and the other, reaching out to the families we were no longer physically seeing each day.

#keepintouch campaign

This led to us creating and launching our #keepintouch campaign, which offers not only online posts focused on providing actual activities parents at home can enjoy with their children, but also support for parents which recognises that for many of them, stay-at-home parenting is a totally new learning curve to go through.

We’ve created a weekly schedule for our posts and mailouts, and every day one of the practitioners who are still in and working, will use our online learning portal to post either something to watch and enjoy, or a nursery activity which has been adapted for home.

A 'find and print' activity for children that are staying at home. The nursery typically cares for 75 children a day, but this has reduced to between nine and 15 , now that nurseries must only stay open for keyworkers and vulnerable children

Posts so far have included story times such as The Gruffalo and The Hairy Toe, a simple yoga session, a makaton-led circle time, a 'search and stamp' painting activity, and an outdoor bug hunt with accompanying checklist.

A virtual yoga session for children and parents at home

As well as our practitioner posts, we also have the senior management team share emails with ideas and ‘hacks’ to support parenting while at home, and these have included articles on supporting good adult and child mental health while at home during the Covid-19 response, an online link to the ‘What to Expect, and When’ framework, and a family number exchange service so families and children can keep in touch with their peers as well as nursery, while the temporary measures are going on.

To keep our posts as varied and as interesting as possible, we’ve themed each day of the week, and have ‘Mental Health Mondays’, ‘Outside Tuesdays’ and ‘Challenge Fridays’ for example. Not knowing how long we’ll be doing this for, having a loose framework will also hopefully help us to keep on generating new ideas that are worth sharing with our families throughout the coming weeks and months.

We’re hoping that all of these efforts will not only provide a much-needed support to our non-attending families, but also that it will facilitate their return to nursery once the measures are lifted. No one really knows what the future will bring at the moment, so all the while we can proactively work to keep our families and local community safe, supported and well, we will.

If any settings who are staying open would like to chat more about our #keepintouch campaign or for anything else we might be able to support with, please feel free to call: we’re all in this together, and we are happy to be here for our wider early years network as well as our immediate families of the setting.