Getting the most out of Famly during closure

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Share activities from our activity library

Our developers have been hard at work making changes to our activity library, to bring you the features you need while parents and children are staying home. It’s now possible to share activities directly to every parent’s News Feed for them to try out with their children at home.

There’s already a library filled with almost 100 activities focused on key EYFS areas, contributed by experts like Sue Cowley, but you can also now more easily add your own activities and attach photos and videos to them. By posting these to the News Feed, you’ll be able to help ensure the children continue their development and that the parents can keep them entertained! Find out more about the activity library here.

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Observations at home

The children’s development can’t and won’t stop just because they aren’t physically in the setting. These next few weeks, and perhaps months, parents will be spending a lot more time with their children and will hopefully be noticing lots of exciting new changes. To get the parents involved in their children’s learning and development, you can encourage them to log these observations in Famly. This will also make the transition back into the setting more smooth once we’re through this temporary closure and things begin to normalise once again.

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Communicate and check in with the parents

As I’m sure you’re well aware, this isn’t an easy time for parents either and many are likely to have concerns about their own workplaces. Just as we want to be here for you during these times, a great way to show that you’re there for them is to keep sending out messages and check in regularly to make sure that things are still going well.

Key workers in your nursery can check in with their children by sending through videos and posts on the news feed too, and if parents have been recording observations from home they can work together with the parents, giving them feedback and offering simple tips to work on from home.

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Managing key workers’ children

With government regulation stating that the children of key workers can continue to receive childcare support, you need a way to easily group these children together – as they may well be spread across different rooms and age groups.

To do so, you can create a tag called ‘Keyworker Child’ and assign all relevant children to it. This ensures you can quickly see who will be coming in, and easily communicate with their parents.

If your area is organising a ‘pooling’ system, you may well get children from other nurseries attend your setting. You can enter these children into your Famly account and assign them to this tag.

I hope this has helped to give you some ideas for different ways your setting’s team can get the most out of Famly during this period. We completely understand that it is a very difficult time, but we’re here to help you through it and come out stronger on the other side. If you feel like you need any help or advice about better utilising Famly, myself and the rest of our customer team are always here to help. We are, and will continue to be, only a phone call or email away.