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Winners of our Annual Easter Competition 2019

Walton Lane is a Lancashire local authority maintained nursery school which offers high quality free nursery education to 3 & 4 year olds.

At Walton Lane they believe that children have a natural enthusiasm for learning and their highly qualified staff support and encourage this by providing engaging and fun opportunities for children to develop their abilities in a supportive and caring environment.

Paulina Shepherd, Business Officer at Walton Lane decided to enter Connect Childcare’s Easter competition, as she recognised that the team of Practitioners at her setting could benefit from the prize; a 2-hour Practitioner Workshop on how to engage every child to get active (plus a bundle of free resources).

Paulina’s entry was picked out of the 400+ entries Connect received and her physical development workshop was booked in!

The workshop took place on 17th June.

What happened on the day:

Coach Kieran from FUNDA arrived with his bundle of exciting resources to deliver the workshop to six of Walton Lane’s keen Practitioners.

The aim of the day was for Coach Kieran to teach the Practitioners, and share his wealth of experience to make the team more confident in promoting physical development with the children.

“I understand that every nursery is unique and so is every child who attends. Not every child in your nursery likes sports so I’m here to help you to engage, inspire, motivate and empower all of your children and staff.” – Coach Kieran – FUNDA

He started by discussing what kind of barriers the practitioners sometimes face when teaching Physical Development. The team admitted that they sometimes use the same games over again because it’s what they can remember when they are put on the spot.

This is where the resources come into good use. The team won a box set of FUNDA Story Books and resource cards which can be used to help develop fundamental movement as well as gross and fine motor skills.

Kieran put the resource cards to the test when he took the team outside and got them playing games as if they were the children of the nursery. He introduced lots of different games and showed them how to switch them up each time to make them more exciting for the children.

Kieran then held a session on how to read the story books. He explained how to make them more exciting, changing his tone of voice and asking the practitioners questions throughout to keep them engaged. He showed them a wealth of resources relating to each book which can help to keep the themes of each activity running throughout all of the nursery activities.

A bit about FUNDA

FUNDA are a multi-award winning, OFSTED registered children’s activity and childcare provider.

They have a wealth of FREE resources! Some of which you can download here: https://www.fundaplay.co.uk/blog/5-fun-physical-activities-for-your-kids-auth-funda