Family day care providers can now access tailor-made training featuring the expertise of speech pathologists, with the release of our new online course. Australian made and research led, the program was created to even the playing field for children preparing for school, by upskilling early educators in sound awareness.
“Sound awareness is a really important part of learning how to read and children who have those skills on entry to school learn how to read much more easily than those who don’t,” course co-creator and speech pathologist Anne Williams said. “Sounds good to me – for family day care providers supports these educators to improve their skills particularly in sound awareness. The course gives access to training, tools and support and lots of resources so that they can be more confident in how they respond to the children in their program.”
Over 93,000 children are cared for in more than 11,000 family day care homes across Australia. With over a million new connections forming every second, children’s brains develop faster in their first five years than any other time in their life. This is when many vital foundational skills are formed.
Anne is passionate about helping family day care providers develop their skills so that more children can thrive in their first year of school.
“We recognise that family day care providers are important when it comes to preparing children for school – they do a great job,” Anne said. “We understand that when you work for yourself it can be difficult to find the time to attend professional development, so our course is designed to do from their own home, in their own time, at their own pace.”
The family day program was created due to popular demand, following the success of our course for early education centres and was created by the same team.
“We had many inquiries from family day care providers about our educators’ course. As it didn’t quite meet their needs we decided to create a version just for family day care.” Anne explained. The price and course content have been adjusted to suit the needs and setting of family day care.
For $99, providers will have 12 months’ access to the course, which contains 7 modules of video lessons, over 3 hours of training, a program ready to implement with the children and more than 35 downloadable resources. The activities with the children are all play based (not computer-based) and easy to integrate with your existing program. Educators can learn at their own pace, and receive a certificate on completion of the course.
A companion course is also available for parents for just $22 for one month’s access to an hour of tips, tricks, games and activities.