This summer camp makes e-learning fun and engaging for kids
The British Orchard Nursery is combining learning with play to ensure that your child’s curricular goals are met
Want the good kind of screen time for your children over the summer? The British Orchard Nursery (BON) educational summer camp for children aged two to six will help with just that, guiding them through developing the necessary learning skills for the upcoming academic year in a fun and engaging way at home.
With the fun title of GROW (Get Ready for the Outside World), the programme has been designed by BON’s EYFS specialists at the British Orchard Training Centre to offer parents all the help and support they need in these unusual times. And every parent knows keeping the little ones engaged is no small feat, so the activities are designed to spark a child’s interest and make Early Years learning hands-on and practical so they can develop various skills in the process.
And it’s not just the kids who get to have some educational fun – the e-learning is also extended to adults, who can participate in daily webinars on various educational topics, from health and hygiene to social care. You also get a chance to learn with qualified tutors from Oxford BON UK and UAE, and earn a teaching diploma from the UK with the British Orchard Training Institute.
Dr Vandana Gandhi, CEO and founder of The British Orchard Group, UK and UAE, says BON kept in mind the UAE’s expats, bilingual families and working mums when developing the programme. “The teaching and learning activities and videos use simple, child-friendly language and show step by step how to engage with and complete the assignments with parents as partners. Training parents, nannies, other adults and teachers across schools and nurseries is now the focus of the BON training centre. The e-learning model has been a necessary alternative. BON has extended this offering now to the parents of the GCC and the Indian subcontinent, where the e-learning concepts are being embraced.”
The award-winning BON curriculum is developed through the goals and learning objectives of the British National Curriculum. Ensuring that a child’s education is not compromised even as they learn from their homes, educational themes are developed weekly as teachers get to know the child’s interests. Think fun topics such as Magic Math, Science curiosity, Dinosaurs, Fairytales etc.
During the summer term, BON will run one live class each day in the areas of art, music and movement, physical education, maths and writing, with children joining in with their teacher and friends. The sessions will run at scheduled times and fully involve both children and parents. There’ll be two further daily activities across academic, arts and science for the early years, with well-researched activities curated by 18 curricular specialists and content teams to ensure children develop and practice their skills. E-learning activities are presented every morning and families have complete control over when they complete it and for how long they work on it, making it easy to schedule around other family commitments. These activities are delivered to each device through the BON app and comprise a teaching video, supporting links, written and verbal instructions and printable tools. The online journals and library space help teachers to review the work after parents upload it, enabling teachers to give each child personalised support and feedback. BON also offers different packages to suit different families, including Arabic, French, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, and Mindfulness and Quran lessons.
The sessions will run at scheduled times and fully involve both children and parents
To motivate children further, in June BON put together e-assemblies and e-graduations to applaud them achieving learning milestones with the support of their parents. The ‘summer school readiness term’ will give those parents an opportunity to participate and invest in skill development of their children. At the end of the programme, the children will be presented with a certificate, a written report of their achievements and a copy of their Online Learning Journal, the ‘BON Baseline’. Graduations will take place in August for the children who finished term 1 and term 2 of preschool but missed term 3 due to the pandemic and who would have now completed the academic year with the summer term 4.
Source From : Friday Magazine