Full of Beanz at home

In the months of March/April the government put the UK on lockdown due to Covid-19 which meant the way the SASP Early Years team worked had to change. We decided to support families at home to stay active using our Full of Beans program but in a slightly different way. We managed to create 15 different recourse cards free of charge to inspire families to keep their young children active. The ideas we came up with used simple pieces of equipment that most families could find around their house.

We hope that in the future these resources can still be shared and used to support families with simple ideas. Our recourse cards can be found on our SASP Early Years website.

Here is an example of what the resources look like:

May Challenge

During May we wanted to create a campaign to get the whole of Somerset involved, we ended up creating a 31-day challenge with different family activities each day. Some key worker children were still attending school around this time, we also encouraged Schools and Early Years settings to get involved with this. We managed to reach 21,030 people through social media which was incredible! Lots of families and settings sent in videos and pictures of them taking part in the challenges which was great to see. Due to the success with this campaign we will be looking to do another challenge for August to keep families active during the Summer holidays.

Early Years CPD training webinars

Before Covid-19 we only delivered our 'Full of Beanz' workshops face to face with Early Years members of staff. We decided that we could transform our workshops to a virtual training online webinar. We managed to deliver 6 webinars to 121 delegates, we created two different types of webinars to suit the current needs of staff working in Early Years. Our two webinars were called:

• Early Years CPD training webinar "How to deliver physical activity with social distancing in mind"
• Early Years CPD training webinar "The importance of Physical Activity in Early Years Foundation Stage"

The main aims of our webinars were to increase confidence levels in staff across Somerset to impact physical activity levels of EYFS children. We had some great feedback across our webinars but here is an example – "Very friendly, very informative. I was daunted as this was both my first Zoom meeting and first Primary based training in 10 years but there was no pressure. Relaxed presentation and very knowledgeable team who worked really well together to present information, keep and eye on questions in the chat box and control the technical aspects, switching to break out rooms was so efficiently managed, I didn't know you could do this. Great to have input from other teachers. Great to be able to do the training at home but keep muted so no one could hear my singing 4 year old."

August Challenge

The August Challenge has now been launched to keep families active over the Summer holidays. The challenges are simple for families to take part in so it's inclusive for all. We aim to reach as many people through social media as possible just like our May Challenge, we created. Please share this on our social media through Facebook and Twitter.