Barnardos New Zealand
National Resource Centre
85 Ghuznee Street
Wellington

Conference targets communication – the key to children’s learning and development

Art, speech, literacy, music and dance are some of the workshops on offer for nearly 100 Barnardos KidStart Caregivers and Number One Nannies at their Wellington/Wairarapa regional conference in Lower Hutt on Saturday, 15 March.

The workshops are in keeping with the conference theme ‘Targeting Communication’.

“Communication has an impact on all areas of children’s learning and development,” says Jill Power, Barnardos Area Manager for the Wellington/Wairarapa. “It’s more than just talking and listening. It cuts across all the sense and it is the key to successful relationships between children, parents, Caregivers, and others.”

“We have a great line up of experts running the workshops. They include Maggie Haggerty, senior lecturer at Victoria University talking about literary, Brook Davies, a speech/language therapist on speech development, Lisa Terreni, Victoria University lecturer on communicating through art and Viv Browne, early childhood education lecturer at Whitireia Polytechnic on music and dance. Stuart Guyton, a professional development coordinator with the Ministry of Education, will run a workshop exploring the essential ingredients for good relationships with infants and toddlers – respect, responsiveness and reciprocity.”

“It should be a very inspirational day, with lots of ideas to help Caregivers in their day-to-day work with children.”

KidStart is Barnardos home-based education and care service for under-five year olds. Under KidStart up to four children at a time are educated and cared for in the homes of trained KidStart Caregivers supported by qualified KidStart Visiting Teachers.

“Professional development is an important element of the KidStart service,” says Jill.
“Barnardos KidStart provides free initial and on-going training for Caregivers at their regional conferences and additional workshops to keep them current with early childhood education trends.

The conference will be held at the Avalon Baptist Church in Lower Hutt, from 9am until 4pm.

ENDS

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