During Childcare Expo Manchester visitors voted at the Star Product Award voting station for the product or service they felt was a key, must have item for early years practitioners.
Visitors chose one item from the list below of nominated products and services and everyone that took part in voting was automatically entered into a free prize draw.
The lucky winner of the Outlast Nursery Intro Set donated by Community Playthings is… Claire Ryder from Sunrise Nursery Wharton!
Star Product Award goes to..
Millwood Education with their “Culture Cube” product!
Nominations
Azilo.com
Offering over 100 online courses and the ability to create your own training, Azilo.com improves your team’s skills quickly and efficiently. You can keep track of every team members progress and develop individual learning plans to help everyone perform at their best. With alerts for expiring certificates and missed CPD, Azilo.com helps you ensure you’re ready for inspection. There’s even a handy document storage area and a course builder, allowing you to create courses specific to your staff and setting. Azilo.com is an affordable, comprehensive and eco-friendly platform to help your team learn and grow.
Blossom Educational Nursery Software
Blossom is the most comprehensive and easy to use online learning, assessment and management software for nurseries.
Created and driven by the expertise of real nursery owners, Blossom improves children’s learning and development, creates stronger parent partnerships and simplifies administrative processes.
Blossom improves quality by empowering nurseries with the purpose-built tools to streamline processes and spend more time with the children. It helps to better track children’s progress with links to the EYFS framework, while the invoicing functionality provides an easy and comprehensive solution to billing, funding and forecasting. Parents love receiving updates and staying involved through the Parent App.
Outlast Nursery intro set by Community Playthings
The Outlast blocks and ramps are intended to support outdoor active and cooperative play. Blocks are designed for use on any level surface including grass and dirt. Their interlocking design allows for many useful and creative structures limited only by your children’s imagination. The ramps enhance the play value of blocks and can be used in water play. Outlast blocks can be left outside all year around and do not require covered storage.
Creative Steps magazine
Packed with fun creative activity ideas and easy craft projects, Creative Steps magazine provides inspiration for early years practitioners to encourage learning through creative play. Get your hands on the latest Summer issue – including ideas for Father’s Day, World Oceans Day, the World Cup… and NEXT LEVEL SLIME with YouTube star Karina Garcia!
Mix and Match Stampers by C.S. Kids
With no doubt, you might have secretly hoped to exchange some stampers from your purchased Stamp Set for ones in another set. C.S. Kids realizes this, which is why we take a step further and offer the Mix and Match Stamper Set.
There are 49 types of stampers for you to choose from and all express practical messages with clear graphics, like “Finger Spaces”, “Much Improved”, “Verbal Feedback” and so much more…
Create your own perfect Stamper Set with 12 of your favourite stamps and gather all that goodness in the box of your choice!
Doll with Down’s Syndrome by Early Years Resources
This beautiful Doll with Down’s syndrome is an excellent resource for promoting inclusion and diversity in your primary school, nursery or early years setting.
Adding Dolls with Down’s syndrome to your setting helps create an inclusive environment and allows children to gain a better understanding and acceptance of those with Down’s syndrome.
Features:
• Made from soft vinyl
• Moveable arms and legs
• Removable clothes
• Anatomically correct
• Ideal for pretend play
Early Years Self-Evaluation Framework
By Early Years Fundamentals. Life without the Ofsted SEF will be quite liberating for those who found it cumbersome and repetitive, but many providers will be anxious about what to put in its place as we still need to evaluate what we do.
If you want to move away from the Ofsted template but don’t have the confidence to develop something yourself, we might just have the answer!
Our template is easy to use and comes with guidance to help you develop a meaningful and manageable self-evaluation document. There are even examples of what to write! AND it costs just £2.45.
The Healthy Eating Song CD
The Early Years Nutrition Partnership has developed a song for early years practitioners and parents to sing with pre-schoolers. The simple, yet catchy tune helps young children to learn about the importance of healthy eating through the power of music. Written by actor and writer Ben Faulks (also known as Mr Bloom from CBeebies) and award-winning composer Richie Webb, ‘The Healthy Eating Song’ is available free of charge on CD, to all early years practitioners and parents, along with a song sheet that outlines the words and actions.
Famly
Famly’s nursery management software helps to manage your finances, staff planning, attendance, child development and parent communication to save you time every day. Famly was designed with a wide range of nurseries to ensure that it fits with the way you work right from day one.
Supervisions for Early Years: Your Complete Guide
By Foundation Focus – By effectively managing performance and ensuring supervisions are embedded in our teams we can improve their effectiveness. Our complete guide involves a whole team approach that ensures everyone understands the ethos of supervisions. All the resources you need including a complete set of Supervision Paperwork, designed so you can add your own paperwork in or just use those documents that are relevant. Our system also supports managing performance and appraisals effectively.
Contents:
- Complete set of supervisions paperwork
- Training for engaging your team
- A comprehensive strategy and a guide to implementation
- Exemplar policies and procedures
Garden Raised Planter
garden4me planters are an excellent way to introduce young children to gardening, growing their own food and planting for bees and butterflies – whilst also encouraging outdoor play.
Gardening provides the perfect opportunity for children to develop language and communication skills and aids physical development.
Ours is an innovative new product with unique key features including a built-in self-regulating reservoir and the option to split the garden into 10 mini-plots. The planters are very easy to assemble, have a lifetime guarantee, are low maintenance, extremely stable and safe with no sharp edges. Available in a range of very bright colours.
Outdoor Wooden Mud Kitchen
By Hope Education – Little ones love cooking up mud pies and can spend hours playing café with a good mud kitchen. Suitable for outdoor use, our NEW mud kitchen is perfect for any setting with limited space or budget. This compact kitchen is perfect for little ones as it is low height and comes with a set of 6 stainless steel accessories. At just £119.99, it really is unbeatable value. Plus, don’t forget all Expo delegates can claim a further 20% off, making it just £95.99! Visit Hope Education on stand E20 for your exclusive discount code.
Tinker People
The Tinker People have been designed with Early Years in Mind. A fun partition, to help create dedicated areas when doing a story or key worker time. They are handmade in the UK by a family run company who have experience in early years. The products are tried, tested and improved by 2, 3 and 4-year-olds! The Tinker People can link to many of the seven areas of learning and characteristics of effective learning, some examples are:
PSED: Understanding emotions by drawing faces on the people.
UTW, Liberty, Mutual Respect(British Values): Exploring similarities and differences, choosing dress/uniforms
Physical & Literacy: Threading
Created by Howefab. Meet the Tinker People on stand G10
Culture Cube by Millwood Education
Our Culture Cubes show 5 different aspects of a different culture and a map of the country on the sixth side allowing you to engage children in discussions about diversity and encourage them to learn about different cultures and children around the world. Help them to imagine living in a different country and discuss the different types of food they would enjoy, how far away the country is, how the weather is different, imagining what their new friends would be like. There are 6 different cultures to choose from. Compliment the cubes with the Multicultural Wall Boards.
Size 30cm foam cube.
Pocket Guides by NDNA
NDNA’s new pocket guides are designed to support practitioners when teaching young children. The pocket guides provide you with sample activities that make the subject fun and engaging with the children in your care.
The guides also enable you to pitch the activities at the right level of understanding, interest and needs of the different children; ensuring their learning is supported, challenged and developed.
There are four guides to choose from:
• Number Activities
• Reading
• Shape, Space and Measure
• Writing.
Visit stand F18 and sign up to NDNA today to get four pocket guides for the price of three!
Bespoke Apps for Nurseries and Pre-Schools
Parentapps’ customised apps help nurseries and pre-schools improve communication with parents by housing meal menus, room information, updates, and newsletters, etc. right within an app on parents’ phones. Additionally, they enable parents to report absences, fill out and return consent forms, and make payments. Our apps are tailored to meet the needs and match the branding of each nursery or pre-school and designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. And, by reducing the number of texts sent and paper printed nurseries can reduce their carbon footprint as well as the costs and resources needed to manage parental communication.
Moving Right from the Start
By Pre-school Learning Alliance – Leading experts in the field share their extensive knowledge and a wealth of playful, practical ideas, indoors and out, to support essential physical development.
Moving Right from the Start explores how physical development has equal status as an EYFS prime area of learning, alongside communication and language and personal, social and emotional development. Together they form the very heart of all learning and development. The publication advises on the wide range of available resources and apparatus that give endless possibilities for open-ended movement-play, from cushions to boxes, from sock balls to plastic bottles. 10% off when you buy today.
The Safe4Kids Protective Education Program Kit
The Safe4Kids Protective Education Program is one of the most comprehensive child protection education programs available. It is designed specifically for early years educators in childcare settings, and primary school teachers.
It is culturally sensitive and children are taught age-appropriate abuse-prevention education concepts and given the opportunity to practise these new skills in a safe, controlled environment.
The program is appropriate for children aged three to seven years, and for children with special needs.
The Flower Table (Part of the Imagine range of Educational Furniture)
The Imagine Flower Classroom Table is an ideal solution for classroom and educational environments. The table consists of a tubular frame with a durable PU edging in graphite grey.
Available in five sizes and a range of nine hard-wearing laminate finishes including a dry wipe option, the table is suitable in a range of modular layouts and ideal for all educational activities.
Colours available: blue, light grey, lime, maple, orange, purple, white and yellow.
Constructed in a range of heights to suit all ages:
S1 – 1200dia x 460mmH
S2 – 1200dia x 530mmH
S3 – 1200dia x 590mmH
S4 – 1200dia x 640mmH
S5 – 1200dia x 710mmH
The product is designed and manufactured in the UK.
Schools and nurseries can be tough environments for furniture and equipment. To demonstrate our confidence in the quality, durability and robustness of our range we offer a full 5 year warranty (subject to fair wear and tear) on all items unless specified otherwise.
“Getting it Right for Children and Families with English as an additional language in the Early Years”
By Kent County Council – Hot off the press with a high number of pre-orders – this handbook provides strategies and support to secure an inclusive approach when working with children and families who speak English as an additional language (EAL).
With very accessible language and in an easy to use, colourful, landscape format, this will enable practitioners to engage with parents of children with EAL, by working through the guide together. It also features a Practice Review Tool enabling and supporting practitioners to reflect and evaluate their everyday practice.
This is the latest offer from our popular suite of inclusion support products.
Wooden Mud Kitchen House by TTS
Our Wooden Mud Kitchen House is a great open-ended, sheltered environment for outdoor role play and messy play scenarios. With storage and a worktop with removable sink, this inviting kitchen provides shelter and shade for your aspiring investigators and creators. Use for a variety of contexts from a mud or texture kitchen, to an outdoor home corner or concoctions centre!
Buddy Bear by YPO
Meet Buddy Bear, a reward for a child to take home when they’ve done well by working hard, listening well or achieving something for the first time. He comes in a bag to carry him home, with striped pyjamas and his own personal rucksack. Buddy bear can spend a weekend with the child who can then share their experiences when they get back to school. It’s a fantastic incentive for children to behave well and helps with language development as they feedback to the rest of the class afterwards. Suitable for age 3 years+.
What’s Worrying You? by Molly Potter - Bloomsbury Education
What’s Worrying You? helps children find the words to describe what’s bothering them and provides gentle guidance on developing emotional literacy and supporting mental wellbeing. Molly Potter uses accessible language to present clear, useful and child-friendly advice that give children a useful approach for how to deal with worries in a practical way before they become too big to handle.
EKILIBRITOR BABY - By Colemoi
This set is dedicated to children starting from two years – a very way to start learning through play. Very simple patterns scale 1 in soft colours will help the child to match them and learn by playing notions of colours and sizes. It is also possible to copy the pattern scale 1 (in back and white) and ask the player to customise it. Naturally, the child will stack the pieces and learn by playing notions of balance to improve fine motor skills.