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Plan of Action for your event: Step 2 Choosing your activities
The Family Learning Festival website has an A-Z of activity ideas. Before choosing your activities you may wish to think about:
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Activities that family members can do together. Family Learning is all about parents/carers and their children learning together.
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The types of activities you target families are interested in. If possible ask them beforehand.
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What people will learn. If you run a face painting session make it a fun learning activity. You could look at make up through the ages or a the science of the skin.
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Incorporating a crowd puller. Some activities always prove to be popular such as football sessions, circus skills or car boot sales. These can be used to attract people, who may then go on to try a new family learning activity.
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Holding a competition. Competitions, especially involving prizes, really get people’s attention and can help you attract lots of free publicity.
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Taking your event to your audience.This could include shopping centres, sports halls or the high street. People prefer to take part in events where they feel comfortable and which are ‘everyday’ venues. Outreach programmes are a good way to start a relationship that could have them stepping through the doors of your venue at a later point.
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How you can inspire further learning. The Family Learning Festival is all about encouraging people to carry on learning. To find out how to run activities that encourage families to carry on learning, download our guide Discovering New Worlds: linking family activities to further learning.
Choosing a theme
Family Learning Festival Award winners have found that having a strong theme for their event contributed to its success. A theme can be used through the whole of an event from the types of activities on offer to the promotional activity to the evaluation techniques. You may wish to use one of our Family Learning Festival themes. For 2009 the overarching theme is ‘Get Together – Discover More’ and it has a number of smaller themes:
Start adding your events to the Family Learning Festival map
The Learning Revolution is here!
Find out how the Campaign for Learning is supporting this October's celebration of everything that's great about learning for its own sake and for personal, family and community development - and how you can get involved. Find out more
Campaign for Learning welcomes Ofsted report on family learning
Family learning, where children and parents engage together in learning sessions, leads to improved communication, confidence and interpersonal skills in children according to a recent Ofsted report. Children also settled in better in class and had improved relationships with teachers and other children following the sessions. The report found that family learning can also lead to qualifications and employment for parents and give them the confidence and skills to help their child. The Chief Inspector recommends that family learning should be promoted as a core school activity. Read the full report.
Time to brush up on essential skills?
The Family Learning Festival is an ideal opportunity to encourage families to brush up on their skills.The Campaign for Learning is working once again with Get On to help promote and support Skills for Life (maths and English) to families during the Festival. You can also find out more about supporting Skills for Life in our dedicated Skills for Life section, which includes all the latest updates on Skills for Life. Our themes section also has ready-to-run activities that embed Skills for Life and can be used for your Family Learning Festival events.
Updated planning guide
See our updated planning guide, which covers information and advice on planning your Family Learning Festival events
We need you!
As we're all aware, the economic conditions mean that everyone's budgets are stretched. So, we need your help to share ideas with new and existing organisers on how to get the most out of Family Learning Festival events. We'd like you to upload video clips about how to organise an event, your top tips or ideas for activities. If you have footage of event itself that's even better - please get permission from attendees before filming and uploading anything to a public arena.
Once you have your video upload it to www.youtube.com and tag it with "Family Learning Festival" and drop us a line to let us know at flf@cflearning.org.uk See what we already have on our channel youtube.com/familylearningtelly Need some help on making a video.
