Eureka! I have found a job!

In May 2010 I had been actively seeking work for months with no luck, I came across a government programme, The Future Jobs Fund, offering paid work experience with organisations for 6months. The Future Jobs Fund was the beginning of one of the best experiences of my life. I applied for a post with Eureka! The National Children’s Museum as an Administration Assistant. I had never envisaged myself working in a business environment but the opportunity had presented itself and I decided to take it on.

If I could put into words how I feel about working for Eureka!, I would be selling Eureka! short. Working at Eureka!, has been an amazing experience which can only be described in its simplest form as breathtaking. When I started working for Eureka! I did not really know what to expect. I can safely say all my initial inhibitions were quickly displaced. As an A-level graduate with little experience in an office/business environment and feeling a little naïve, I thought I would be out of place. The reality was completely to the contrary and within a week I felt as if I had been working at Eureka!, for the greater part of the year.

Although I had joined the Marketing and Development Team at Eureka!, there was an informal environment and the atmosphere was in line with the playful ethos of the museum. Being in the Corporate Office was slightly daunting as the team is highly efficient and professional yet everyone is friendly and easy to approach, so it created a great productive atmosphere to work in. Not only am I privileged to be working with some of the brightest minds in the industry, but at the same time I’ve been inspired to go above and beyond my best. Working at Eureka! has been amazing, no one day goes by that is the same. You can be working on a corporate event with blue chip clients wanting an informal environment for some genuine team building, or doing a workshop with children excited to learn about poo. In the galleries I enjoyed seeing children’s faces light up in excitement at speaking to Scoot the Robot, and I was challenged doing research for fundraising and marketing campaigns, everyday is different and almost always exciting.

David running the Wacky Races session as part of Playday 2010

I have learnt a great deal at Eureka! over the past year from life skills to comprehensive business skills that I hope will put me in good stead for my future career. I am also currently waiting for confirmation that I have passed my NVQ Level 3 Diploma In Business and Administration.  I am more confident and my interpersonal skills have significantly improved from my time here.! From being a shy young man trying to find his career path, to being a professional orientated individual with a promising future ahead. I owe a lot to the team at Eureka! as I embark on the next stage of my life, I take on board everything I have learnt and all the experience I have gained in my role. After over a year of working at Eureka! (my contract was extended after the Future Jobs Fund placement) I am currently preparing to start work with the UN on anti-poverty initiatives and human right issues in Third World countries. As I leave I will always remember the playful ethos of Eureka! particularly the essence of play, "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

David Dube is the Administration Assistant at Eureka! The National Children's Museum and will be leaving at the end of the month to work with the UN. 

Five Practice Tasks to Help Improve Your Child’s Hand Eye Coordination

As an ex-professional tennis player, I have years of tennis playing and coaching experience. When my daughter reached two I started to recognise that games we played were not only fun but helped develop hand-eye co-ordination and many other skills. I soon realised that this was something that many other parents would appreciate and started to develop Tennis Tots.

The Tennis Tots curriculum helps improve agility, balance and coordination in young children as well as devising educational based lessons; which allow children to learn numeracy, colour recognition and language skills whilst building their confidence along the way.

Parents play a crucial role in both the introduction to sports and earlier stages of a child’s development. Children from the ages of 2-5 years can be introduced to many fun games and skills to help improve their Hand-Eye Coordination; the ability of the eyes to guide the hands in movements.

Why is it so important for your child to develop this skill?
•    In school, visual-motor integration, which is a vital skill for handwriting, grows out of a good hand-eye coordination base. The eyes need to guide the hand in forming the letter shapes and making sure they stay within the lines of the page.
•    In gross motor games, hand-eye co-ordination can help your child to catch a ball and hit a ball with a bat or racket
•    Eye tracking skills, which are vital for reading, can also develop through the gross motor games used for hand-eye coordination.
Here is a list of tennis based activities from the Tennis Tots curriculum that you can use at home with your children to help develop your child’s hand-eye coordination. All of these activities are used within the Tennis Tots programme and can benefit children from age 18 months-8 years of age in a number of ways. They are also a great chance for you to spend some fun time with your child doing something that is both active and educational.

Balloon Tap Up
Try to keep a balloon up in the air by tapping it up with both hands or by using a racket. Children can try using one hand or two hands depending on their ability and parents can tap the balloon alternately with their child to make it more fun. This exercise is great for developing each child's hand eye coordination and helps to improve tracking skills at an early age. Try to count the number of hits you get and improve on your score each day.

Catch and Bounce Catch
Practice throwing a big ball (no bigger than a football) underarm so that the children can catch it without a bounce. Try to kneel down so that you are at eye level with the children when you throw the ball. This will help the children track the flight of the ball more easily. Try to count to ten catches before progressing the exercise to throwing the ball with a bounce before catching it. Practice saying "Bounce and then Catch" so that the children get used to the rhythm of the ball bouncing and then catching it. For a more challenging exercise you can throw the ball to the right hand side and the left hand side and see if the children can move and catch the ball after one or two bounces. If the children can handle this get them to say split and do a split step before you throw the ball. This will help them be ready to receive the ball. Counting the number of catches you do allows the children to develop their numeracy skills along the way. You could count from 1-10 or count backwards from 10-1 or even start at 20 and progress from there depending on the age and developmental stage of your child.

 Fetch
Practice rolling a tennis ball through your child’s legs with them facing away from you. As soon as the ball comes into vision they chase it and pick it up with either their left hand or right hand depending on the instruction. Try progressing this exercise by asking the children to sidestep back like a crab or jump back with their feet together like a Kangaroo.

Rollerball
Sit down on the floor opposite your child with legs apart. Practice rolling a big ball (no bigger than a football) between your legs and counting the number of rolls you can do. Encourage your child to stop the ball with two hands by putting the palms of their hands on the top of the ball before pushing it back. 
For older children who find this task easy try getting them to stand on a marker and roll a ball to either their left side or right side. When the ball comes, encourage your child to move and stop the ball with either their right or left hand, depending on where the ball was rolled and then encourage them to roll it back with that hand before sidestepping back to their marker to repeat the task. This is an excellent activity to develop perception skills as well as developing hand eye coordination and balance whilst helping children learn about the left and right sides of the body.

Floor Tennis
Practice rolling a big ball with a 17 inch or a 19inch racket along the floor standing about 5 ft from each other. Encourage your child to trap the ball with the racket and then roll it back to you. Try counting to ten rolls and then start again.
For older children this exercise can be done using left and right hands and will involve more movement. Starting on a marker, try rolling the ball to either side try rolling it away from your child encouraging them to move and trap the ball with their racket either with their left or right hands. Once the ball has been trapped, children should attempt to roll the ball back from a sideways on position before recovering back to a marker with a side step. 

Try doing this exercise three times per week for five minutes each time and it will really help your child improve their hand-eye coordination skills as well as improving their overall development in a number of areas.

Matt will be at Eureka! on Sunday 12 June giving Tennis Tots half hour taster sessions. To watch a video of some of these exercises and to learn more about the Tennis Tots programme watch the video below:

Matt McTurk is the creator of Tennis Tots, an educational based Tennis Programme aimed at boys and girls from 2-5 years of age which runs across Yorkshire. For more information about the Tennis Tots programme visit our website. If you are new to Tennis Tots you can book a free trial by calling  07725339257 or email us.

We’re going on a bear hunt…we’re going to catch a big one…

We all know and love the classic ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen, which is why we chose it to be the theme of our 2011 Early Years Fiesta. The Early Years Fiesta is an event catering solely for pre-booked Early Years groups in the first week of May during SATs week. This year was such a fantastic success with record bookings, that ‘Early Years Week’ became ‘Early Years Three Weeks’. The feedback we have received so far has all been extremely positive, showing that this event was enjoyed by all.

This story, by its very nature, lends itself well to the outdoors, so we decided that it would be fantastic to make use of our newest outdoor exhibition, ‘The Wonder Walk’. Through this adventure the children were guided by two of our Eureka! explorers, where they overcame the obstacles that the story threw at them on their quest to find the Bear. We used the willow structures for the ‘long wavy grass’, water trays for the ‘splishy splashy river’, ‘icky sticky mud’, trees and branches for the ‘deep dark forest’, and artificial snow for the ‘swirling whirling snow storm’, the overall effect was fantastic!

Looking for the Bear

Even though we love the Bear Hunt story we could not resist putting our own Eureka! spin on it and so added a new magical element to the story. This was in the form of a kind Eureka! Fairy who had left some of her fairy dust for the children. The children were asked to take a pinch of this glittery dust and to think of their favourite animal, then sprinkle the dust in the air to become that animal (with their imaginations switched on of course). We had allsorts of animals emerging, turning the Eureka! park in to a unique menagerie of animals.  This ranged from bears and tigers to dinosaurs and unicorns galloping and flying around the Wonder Walk. However, this fairy dust is notorious for wearing off quickly and all too soon we were all human once again, carrying on with our journey to find the bear- who as it turned out, like everything at Eureka! was very friendly too.      

Finding the bear

The weather was not always on our side but we had a fantastic time ‘Swishy Swashing’, ‘stumble triping’ and ‘Squish Squashing’ our way through the Wonder Walk.

The Eureka! version of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ is open to the public until 3 June (tomorrow). Let us know what you thought of it and which other stories you would like us to add a bit of Eureka! magic to.

 Penny Dargan-Makin is the Early Years Specialist Enabler at Eureka!