Professional development

Professional sound awareness course for regional NSW FDC educators

Freya Lucas

Feb 16, 2022

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Family day care (FDC) providers across the New England region of New South Wales are set to benefit from tailor made training through an educational and informative online course which has been created to “even the playing field” for children in the years before school.

The main aim of the locally created 'Sounds Good To Me' program, the brainchild of speech pathologist Anne Williams, is to focus on upskilling early childhood educators in sound awareness.

Sound awareness, Mrs Williams explained, plays a crucial role in ensuring children thrive not only in their early childhood settings but in school as well.

"Sound awareness is a really important part of learning how to read and children who have those skills on entry to school learn how to read much more easily than those who don't, " Mrs Williams told local publication Armidale Express.

The course, which has a specific variant for FDC providers, upskills educators by offering access to training, tools and support and lots of resources so that they can be more confident in how they respond to the children in the program, she added.

With over a million neural connections forming every second in a child’s brain, Mrs Williams said that the first five years are a pivotal time for children to develop vital foundation skills.

Understanding the unique complexities of the FDC environment, the course has been designed to complete from home, and is self paced.

For $99, providers will have 12 months' access to the course, which contains seven modules of video lessons, over three hours of training, a program ready to implement with the children, and more than 35 downloadable resources.

The activities with the children are all play-based (not computer-based) and easy to integrate with existing programs.

A companion course is also available for parents for just $22 for one month's access to an hour of tips, tricks, games and activities.

To learn more about the Sounds Good To Me courses, visit www.soundsgoodtome.com.au. For the original coverage of this story please see here.

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