At Helping Hands Childminding, we pride ourselves on providing a home-from-home environment. We mirror each child's home as much as possible to support them to feel comfortable and enabling them to settle. We believe we provide a perfect transition between the children’s home and a more formal education allowing the children to feel safe and therefore thrive at our setting. In everything we do, the children are at the heart. 

We value and promote each child's individuality. Our curriculum is based on the children’s individual interests, by following the children’s interests we find children are highly engaged, allowing us to meet their learning needs, and enable all children to thrive and achieve their full potential. We believe the early years are some of the most important years of a child’s life, during this time it is vital that children build positive relationships and are nurtured and supported. We believe it’s important to ensure every child is given the time, care and support they need. 

We offer a child-led curriculum, as we believe it is through play children make sense of their world and engage in high levels of learning. Children have an intrinsic motivation to learn by being curious, exploring, investigating, watching and listening, talking and discussing, creating and communicating. We allow children the freedom to be independent and we encourage them to learn from mistakes and bounce back after difficulties, using their critical thinking skills to solve problems. With this in mind, our intent is to foster a love of learning through investigating first hand magic, awe and wonder of our world. We aim to offer opportunities to explore a wide range of interesting and exciting experiences that spark curiosity and begin a life long love of learning.. 

If there are opportunities for real-life experiences, we ensure they are taken to enhance and expand children's cultural capital. Cultural capital empowers children, enables them to set goals, become successful, regardless of their background, wealth or financial situation.  Our village has an action group which adds to our local amenities, we often get involved with this group which brings everyone together and supports our village to become a better place. We get involved in a number of ways such as creating displays for our local war memorial and helping to care for local fruit and vegetables that are grown in the community garden. We believe it’s important to teach the children that we can help people, we often get involved with local charities such as food banks and children’s charities to support this. 

We believe in the importance of spending time outside everyday. We do this in a range of ways such as using our private garden and going out on trips. We offer a wide range of trips such as, visiting local shops, libraries, cafes, parks, beaches, classes, garden centres, local woods, farms and zoos. We have regular forest school, we prepare activities based on the children’s interests and also follow the children’s natural curiosity during these sessions. We allow the children to experience the outdoors in every type of weather so long as it is safe to do so. Being outdoors is proven to relieve stress and anxiety, reducing cortisol in the brain. Children can move with ease, shout, take risks and express themselves freely, resulting in the play becoming more open ended, therefore supporting the child to develop and use initiative. Learning opportunities are amazing in the outdoors, often more so than indoors.

We look at each child holistically, looking at what they have recently learnt and how they have progressed. This highlights what we need to support children with, creating  next steps, while identifying any concerns we may have and putting support in place for concerns such as individual learning development plans. We follow the EYFS (Early Years Statatory Framework) and focus on the seven areas of learning which are Communication and Language, Physical Development, Personal, Social and Emotional Development. Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding of the World and Expressive Art and Design. We are guided by the document Development Matters, as it gives an overview of how children can develop and learn while setting out a possible pathway for their development. As all children are different, our professional judgement is applied and each child's individuality is carefully considered and catered for. 

We are constantly sharing information with parents regarding their children’s learning and development, we update parents weekly on our online learning journal including activities/trips/classes we have attended and a written summary is given on how this has supported the children’s learning, we also discuss any concerns and also any progress we/parents have noticed during handovers. We work closely with parents to help each child achieve their next steps by supporting parents with tailored home learning packs for each child which are regularly sent home with children along with our weekly reading books. 

We have goals for all the children within Helping Hands Childminding, we believe it is important that all children learn to be:

- Kind: we believe learning to be kind is the key to positive interactions with others and their world

- Resilient:  we allow children to be independent, make mistakes, learn from mistakes and find ways to move forward

- Well mannered: we incorporate British Values in everything we do, we take turns, are well mannered, learn about the world around us and learn to follow rules. 

- Confident: we believe having confidence and high self esteem supports children meeting their goals as they believe they are capable

- Good communicators: we believe communication is the foundation of children’s thinking and learning

- Have happy little minds: we believe being positive, happy and finding joy in the small things supports the children’s mental health and well-being, not just for now but for their lifetime

We believe all of these goals are important key life skills.