While Nannies, Childminders and Au Pairs are all there to help look after your children, the terms of engagement are very different, and that is what distinguishes the different roles.

A Nanny is paid to come into your house and help look after the children.  A nany has set hours and will generally work to a routine, but usually only looks after your children, possibly alongside her own.  You effectively employ a nanny and they have certain employment rights, including the ability to take paid maternity leave.

A childminder is someone who you pay to look after your children in their own setting.  They may pick children up from your home or from school, you usually have set hours and may be responsible for paying additional for any overtime incurred.  They will usually be OFSTED registered and inspected, and will look after a children from various families, often of varying age groups.

An au pair is someone who looks after your children, usually in return for board and lodging and a small amount of 'pocket money' (typically less than £100 per week).  Au Pair's are usually foreign nationals and often young women and men taking a 'gap year' before or after higher education and are generally looking to spend some time in this country and improve their language skills.  In addition to working an agreed number of hours looking after children, they may do light housework and other chores such as cooking meals.  Usually an au pair is a 'live in' position so you must have a spare room for them to live in, and you must share bathroom and kitchen facilities as required.

You will generally have a contract in place for each of these types of role, and you should look at insurance cover to make sure that they are covered for the work they do for you.  All may look after children of all ages, including babies, although they are restricted by law as to how many children of different age group they may look after at once.  Therefore, for practical reasons, not all child carers have the necessary space to take on your children, and they may focus on offering services to children of a specific age or attending certain settings or schools.

Five year old Aelita Andre has taken the art world by storm having created colourful works of art compared to the works of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.  Aelita has already made over £100,000 through sales of her art, she has exhibited internationally to critical acclaim and you cannot snap up her works for less than £3,000!

Aelita creates large canvas artwork using a variety of techniques including dropping and spraying paint, using hands to massage it into shape and sticking small objects such as twigs, pom poms and sweet wrappers to the canvases.  You might think that she is just a precocious child with pushy parents who have created a story from nothing, but visit her website and you have to agree that there's something profoundly awesome about the art that she is creating!  It really isn't the typical work of a five year old!

Aelita started young - her first exhibition in Melbourne opened when she was just two years old, and the same year she exhibited work in Hong Kong.  Since then her work has been exhibited in New York and at the Chianciano Art Museum Biennale in Italy.  This year she will exhibit in New York again, but a little closer to home, her work has just exhibited in London at the Gagliardi Gallery where she was one of 30 artists to have work selected from the Biennale.

Art is not her only talent, Aelita, of Russian heritage but living in Australia, speaks English and Russian fluently.  She plays piano and violin and sings and enjoys ballet and gym.  What a talented young lady!

Visit Aelita Andre's website.

The Department for Education is partway through a consultation exercise on changes planned for Sure Start Children's Centre's, if you wish to respond to the proposals then you must do so by the 1st June 2012.  The consultation period is shorter than for most similar exercises and is looking for feedback on draft statutory guidance relating to Sure Start centres.

Sure Start Children's Centres are places managed by or on behalf of local authorities to ensure children's services are offered in an integrated way.  Children's services might be made available onsite but if not, advice and assistance should be given to obtain children's services.  Early years provision covers early education and childcare.  Children's services include social services, health services, training and employment advice and information for young children, parents and prospective parents.

The aims of Sure Start Centres are to open equal access to opportunities and education to all from an early age so that children reach a level playing field by the time that they reach school.  The centres particularly target more deprived communities who may not have access to such good facilities to help educate and nurture young children prior to reaching school.

Anyone is entitled to respond to the proposed changes, even if you aren't engaged in offering professional services to the young or parents.  If you would like your voice to be heard then put forward your view on the Department for Education's consultation website.

If you have some garden space, why not create a haven for insects and log, with your little ones, what you see over time?  Plant flowers and make other insect friendly features.  You could start by planting wild flowers from seed and allowing a small section of your garden to 'overgrow'.  Let a small patch of grass grow long naturally and sprinkle wildflower seed down.  Don't worry if nettles or other weeds grow, these are perfect for insects!

If you want to create an insect garden more quickly you could buy some more established plants from a garden centre.  Look for lavenders, budleias, cornflowers and wallflowers.  These typical cottage garden plants attract butterflies and other insects.

Ladybirds are a gardeners friend - they live off many other insects regarded as pests, including aphids.  You can buy ladybird shelters in most garden centres but you can also make one very easily.  Take a plastic drink bottle (1 or 2 litre) and cut the bottom off it.  Find a length of corrugated card and cut the width to match the length of the bottle.  Roll the card up and place it inside the bottle.  Thread some wire through the bottle and the card to keep it in place.  Put the 'house' in the garden and see what you attract!

Make a log book with your children.  Have them draw pictures of the flowers and insects, and make notes on what days you see different insects.  Note which plants you see which insects on and create a project to follow throughout the spring and summer.  Talk about the life cycle of insects, especially ones such as butterflies and ladybirds that go through a process of metamorphosis.

In 2008/2009, only 9% childminders were graded 'Outstanding' but with 55% making 'Good' and 30% 'Satisfactory', there's little to worry about in the provision of childcare on the whole.  But what makes turns a Good childminder into an Outstanding one?

OFTSED recognise a number of features that contribute towards the award of an Outstanding review, and it's largely not about what you do in your setting, but what goes on around and outside of it.

The overwhelming contributing factors highlighted by OFSTED are those of continual reflection and improvement...childminders must never stand still!  Factors include:-

• Continually working with parents and other carers to exchange information about the child and family (this plays a more important role in EYFS 2012 to be introduced in September)
• Continually reflecting on their provision and looking at how they might improve
• Attending regular training on educational and developmental matters and gaining recognised childcare qualifications
• Having an excellent understanding of the EYFS areas of learning
• Reviewing and revising procedures and policies on a regular basis
• Using external resources including OFSTED self-evaluation forms, childminder advisers and local network and quality schemes to help identify and implement improvements

Having all the toys in the world, cooking the best food or playing the best games with your children alone won't achieve Outstanding status.  An Oustanding childminder almost needs to treat their work as a career rather than a job.

Your little ones simply adore copying what you do, and when your working in the kitchen, nothing will make them happier than to play with the same kitchen implements that you use - wooden spoons, spatulas, whisks and bowls.  Of course, they don't need to mess up your lovely kitchen utensils, although nylon and wooden ones would be perfectly safe for them, you can also buy whole sets of kitchen utensils from any toy store.

Pretend kitchen play is a valuable pastime for all kids.  At a physical level they are learning about materials and honing their fine motor skills as they drop ingredients into bowls and stir them.  They are also growing their understanding of how food is prepared, learning what is involved and about where their meals come from.

As they grow older you can move from pretend utensils to real ones, and from play food to real 'dried foods' (such as pasta, dried fruit, cereal etc.) and on to genuine cooking.  Next time you are in a supermarket, take a look in the home baking aisle and you will find all manner of easy foods that you can whip up with the kids.

Here are some simply foods that you can buy from the supermarket and which even the youngest children can 'cook':-

• 'Shake and bake' fairy cakes - just add milk, put into cake cases and bake
• Home bake scone mix - just add water (and raisins if you like), mix, roll, cut and back
• Home made muffin mix - just add a little oil, water and an egg, put into cases and bake
• Fresh croissant or pain au chocolate - sometimes difficult to find in the supermarket (try the chiller cabinets where ready made pastry is), fresh dough comes in a tube; open, shape the pastries onto a baking tray and bake
• Pizza - buy a fresh base and spread with your favourite toppings; start with a plain dough and add passata and cheese, or buy a Margherita and add your own flavours.  Cook as per instructions

All these products can be prepared in around 5 minutes and baked in around 20, and can form a part of the children's real meals.  Try to cook with your children at least once a week and they will have a whale of a time!

Although the EYFS is a prescriptive programme to help cover a wide variety of development topics, almost everything we do covers aspects of EYFS without even having to try, and that's because EYFS is really gearing us up to learning about the real world.

Take a trip to the supermarket for example, your little ones are learning where their food comes from, they can help find products on the shelves, they help you with the money when you come to pay.  These activities touch elements of health and bodily awareness (PD), place (KUW), and shapes, space and measures and calculating (PSRN).

Picking up siblings or other children from school and chatting with mum's at the school gate aids language (CLL) and sense of community (PSED) as well as helping grow confidence (PSED), the walk alone contributing to Physical Development.

Familiarity with the goals of EYFS will let you turn every routine task or chore into a learning game.  Accentuate the lessons across the different areas of the EYFS and at every step you will be nurturing your children in understanding the world, their place within, and in how everything works. Don't forget to log the lessons learned in your Daily Diary at ToucanLearn!

The National Trust has launched a challenge to get children to do a variety of activities that they may not have considered doing.  Called '50 Things To Do Before You're 11 ¾', lots of the activities can be undertaken by very young children.  A few activities encourage you to visit a National Trust property in your own area, but many can be done in the garden or in the park.  Participating in the challenge is FREE!

Set out to try to undertake as many of the 50 activities with your little ones over the Summer.  You may have to simplify versions of some of the activities for really small children, but with your help, even little toddlers will be able to do lots of them, such as 'Bury someone in the sand', 'Climb a huge hill' or 'Eat an apple from a tree'.

Find full details of the National Trust's challenge here: 50 Things To Do Before You're 11 ¾.

If you're not the sort naturally to be inclined to go on long walks, then make it into a great game and join the geocaching craze!  If you've never heard of it, there's a whole secret world waiting to be discovered by you, and it starts just outside your doorstep!  Take the kids out to your favourite parks and open spaces and you'll almost certainly find hidden treasure waiting for you - even in parks that you thought you knew like the back of your hand.  The kids will quickly become addicted and you'll find yourself geocaching wherever you go.

Geocaching is a treasure hunt.  All over the country, in fact the world, are thousands and thousands of little treasure chests.  The majority are actually old film canisters (remember those?!) while larger ones might be small tupperware boxes.  Inside you will find little toys and often a pencil and a log sheet.  The idea is that you have to find them and when you do so, you are entitled to take one of the toys as a prize, but you must also replace it with something else for the next person.  Small prizes might be a coin, marble, plastic soldier, rubber creepy-crawlies,  or anything else.

How to find them?  These things are, quite literally, littered across the nation.  A central database has them all logged by GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude).  If you have a smartphone then go along to your app store and you'll find a variety of apps to help you locate and navigate to these secret hideaways.  Your mobile phone will help you arrive at the right place through its GPS system, you'll see your progress on an onscreen map as you close in on the cache.  Coordinates are accurate to a few metres, and caches have a hint that helps you find them, often describing a tree or bench where the container will be found.  Find out more and view the database of geocaches online at http://www.geocaching.com.

Learning to recognise colours takes time and patience but it comes to all toddlers with practice.  To help toddlers to learn their colours, undertake long term colour projects.  Create a 'colour wall' in your home or setting, create a label for each colour, written in its own colour.  Write balloon letters, coloured in for best effect.  Attach the labels to the wall leaving space around them and you are now set to start your project.

Every few days, select a magazine or catalogue and look at the pictures with your little one.  Identify an object in the picture that is primarily a single colour, point to it and talk about what colour it is.  For children who aren't yet talking, tell them what colour it is, for young toddlers who are babbling, ask them what colour and see if they can guess correctly.

When you have talked about the picture and identified the colour together, cut the picture out and lift up your toddler so that they can stick the picture to the wall around the correct colour label.

Over a few weeks, your wall will grow into a great big colour chart with large swathes of each colour around each label.  It will look pretty and serve as an aid for remembering colours and the repetitive nature of the project will help them to identify and learn their colours.

You might not think that taking your kids along to a highbrow stately home seems much of a day out, but if you've not done this before, try it, see and be amazed!  The UK has hundreds of palaces, castles, stately homes, gardens, country homes and parks.  The National Trust, English Heritage, Historic Royal Palaces and Historic Houses Association curate hundreds of historic properties around the nation.  Fine one near you and enjoy a lovely day out.

These properties usually have delightful gardens and extended parkland that young children will adore.  Perhaps you'll find a deer park, or grotto's to climb or beautiful lakes to wander around?  Formal gardens will provide a splendid backdrop for make believe games or simply to run around.  Look out for large vegetable gardens, smell herb beds and delight at the colour of beautiful herbaceous borders.

The homes themselves might have fabulous treasures to marvel at.  You will see old fashioned artifacts.  Historic kitchens are great to explore as you can see old tools that are replaced by modern kitchen gadgets.  Don't expect young children to spend ages looking at every detail in every room, but wander through the property at a pace they are comfortable with and when you see them take an interest in something, talk with them, describe it and tell them what it is.  Discuss with older children what the differences are between these homes and your own - look around formal drawing rooms and work out how historical occupants used to pass their time without televisions or the internet!

Find a property to visit near you by visiting these websites:-

• National Trust
• English Heritage
• Historic Royal Palaces
• Historic Houses Association

The first five years of a child's life are hugely important in terms of development and sets them up for the rest of their lives.  Understandably the first five years of life sees enormous growth as a baby grows into an infant.

You can easily monitor a baby's growth in weight and size, but what is more difficult to monitor is the development of their brain.  Over this critical period the brain is forming and the neurons are evolving into a network that will power your childs thinking for the rest of their lives.  Scientific research has shown that the more a baby is stimulated, the earlier their brain develops and the more attentive and clever they will grow to be in time.

Stimulating a baby from birth will pay dividends in the long run.  This is why you should constantly talk with your little ones, even if they are nowehere near being able to communicate back.  This is why you should expose them to lots of different environments - take them on days out, take them on long walks (even if you are simply pushing them in a buggy) and show them as many different experiences as you can.  All of this will help their brain develop early on and you will be rewarded with bright children in the future.

When childminders give children snacks and meals, the Early Years Foundation Stage statutory framework requires that they be 'healthy, balanced and nutritious'.  It's fairly easy to whip up a meal that fills the criteria because you can balance a meal with fresh vegetables and use fresh ingredients.

If you are providing processed foods such as sausages, ham, nuggets, fishfingers or burgers then check the ingredients and the nutritional breakdown of the foods you are buying.  To buy the healthiest options, compare the fat, sugar and salt content.  Processed foods are often far more laden with salt and sugar to create flavour than if you were to make the same fare at home.  When comparing fat content of products, go for ones with the least saturated fat which is more harmful than unsaturated fat. Better still, try make your own products at home and then you are aware of their contents.  You can easily make burgers, fishcakes and breaded chicken or turkey nuggets - slightly time consuming but not difficult.

Try to ration meat to two or three main meals a week, offer vegetarian options (eg. jacket potato and baked beans, mild vegetarian chilli, vegetable lasagne etc.) and fish (fishcakes, jacket potato and tuna, breaded fish etc.) on other occasions.

Processed snacks can also be much less healthy than you might imagine.  Snacks are often packaged to make them appear to be healthy but when choosing snacks, again, make sure you compare the fat, sugar and salt content.  It's very easy to give children a high salt diet without realising and some healthy looking snacks contain more saturated fat than a packet of crisps!  Better still, make snacks yourself.  Fruit and vegetables chopped into portions perhaps make the best snacks.  Buy yourself a hot air popcorn maker and make fresh popcorn but without the salt or sugar.

Providing healthy, balanced and nutritious food isn't difficult but it can be deceptive if you are offering factory processed foods.  Check the food labels and know what you are feeding your little ones.

Take your little ones to a park and look and listen to see animals communicating with each other, talk about how we talk to each other to communicate, and describe what other animals are doing. Look out for dog walkers who might be talking to their dogs, shouting commands to them.  Look at how the dog responds, how do they show that they are happy?  How do they play with their owners?

Listen out for birds calling to one another.  When birds sing they are often exchanging song with a partner or potential mate.  See if you can stand near to where a bird is singing and listen to its bursts of song.  Then listen in the gaps between and see if you can hear thesame notes repeated back by another bird at a distance.  Birds often exchange song in this way for minutes, you must just be patient to listen out for this and recognise that the communication is not simply one bird singing, but two birds exchanging notes.

Ponds should provide more evidence of animals communicating, especially when young ducklings have hatched.  Look at how parent ducks protect their young from intruders - they will squawk at other birds and even people that step too close to their brood.  Look at how ducks might peck each other to 'fight' over a partner.  At the right time of year you might also hear the sounds made by frogs who make a terrific mating call, using sound to attract a partner.

Listen to what other noises you can hear from the park thamight interrupt birds communicating over distance.  Can you hear the sounds of traffic?  ...trains?  ...aeroplanes?  All this noise pollution has a detrimental effect on animals being able to communicate.  Talk with your little ones about how this will impact their ability to communicate and demonstrate how you have to talk louder yourself as you approach the noise of traffic.

The revised EYFS framework was published this week, the existing framework, EYFS 2008, remains in place until the end of August, the new framework called EYFS 2012 will be mandated from the 1st September. The revised framework aims to reduce bureaucracy and simplify learning and development requirements, reducing the early learning goals from 69 to 17. The framework concentrates on the three areas of learning deemed the most important:-

• Communication and language
• Physical
• Personal, social and emotional development

In addition to these 'Prime Areas' there are also four futher 'Specific Areas':-

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the world
• Expressive arts and design

At ToucanLearn we will revise our system to tie in with EYFS 2012, ready for launch on 1st September.  At the same time we will launch some new features to offer new tools to help childcarers implement the EYFS.  We're excited about these changes, while we always felt that the EYFS offered a great platform for early learning, we also think that these revisions help to focus on the important parts of learning and will help those who might have struggled with the breadth of coverage of EYFS 2008.  We will write more about the revised EYFS framework over the next few months, and keep you informaed of changes coming toToucanLearn.

You can download the new EYFS framework here.