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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.