News and blog

In August 2018 our Programme Director Caroline went out to Palestine to visit the NGO Engage, our newest partner.

Our upcoming training dates for autumn 2018 are below. If you can’t see one in your area, please look at our list of Licensed Trainers and contact them directly to arrange a training.

Steph Reed from ASDTeacher.com shares her top tips for communicating clearly with a child with autism and why it’s crucial to do so.

As an educational psychologist I have always been aware of how an individual’s early life and in particular their attachment experiences impact on their cognitive, social and emotional development.

Moving from primary to secondary school can be a difficult time. That’s why we are delighted to be involved in a new book Curse of the Nomed, created by our corporate partner Wesleyan.

The Zippy’s Friends programme in Panama has transcended school classrooms and has become a way to involve teachers, parents, families, whole schools and the community, with everyone cooperating to promote children’s emotional well-being.

10 years ago… Zippy landed in the Republic of Mauritius, a small tropical island in the Indian Ocean. It quickly adapted to the climate! and started its journey in 10 primary schools, meeting 1,045 children and 34 teachers.

We were kindly invited to take part in a charity trolley dash at the opening of the new Entertainer toy store in Kingston upon Thames on Saturday 27th January 2018.

Children North East is the oldest regional charity in the North East. For the last 127 years we have been transforming the lives of disadvantaged children so that they have a better chance in life.

The development of thinking skills is an essential life skill for all our children. Consider the journey a child takes as they move from a curious baby to an inquisitive pre-schooler, moving to an experimenting reception child, into a questioning KS1 child, then using their skills as a theorist and researcher in to KS2, ready to move into the next stage of their life. 

Partnership for Children is supporting an important research project that is looking to recruit girls aged 10 and their parents with a focus on emotional competence during the transition from primary to secondary school.

In our last newsletter in Summer 2017 we asked for your feedback on running Zippy’s Friends and Apple’s Friends. We received feedback from over 70 schools. Such feedback is invaluable and helps us to develop and improve the programme, so many thanks to all those who took the time to complete the survey. All schools were entered into a prize draw.

In our fast-paced lives technology certainly offers many benefits. In terms of communication we can have chats with many people at the same time on social media platforms. We can be always up to speed and in the know. Is this 21st Century Communication part of evolution? Is there a side effect? Should we be concerned?

The Todd Ouida Children's Foundation is proud to have introduced Zippy's Friends to the United States, with the enthusiastic support of Dr. Gerard Costa, now director of the Center for Autism and Early Childhood Mental Health at Montclair State University.

We recently visited a very successful Zippy’s Friends session in a school in Croydon, south London – all the more impressive because it was Module 5, session 2, where the class discusses death. Many teachers are apprehensive about this, particularly because children may voice all sorts of ideas about what happens after death.

The original impetus for Zippy’s Friends came from the suicide prevention movement, with the aim of enabling children to find positive coping skills so that they wouldn’t feel the need to resort to desperate measures such as self-harm or suicide.

Here’s something to fill those spare hours(!) over the summer… Download our new Zippy knitting pattern and make your very own Zippy!

The attack at the concert in Manchester and the attack in London has, understandably, caused a lot of fear and anxiety amongst children and parents. 

School transitions can be an unsettling time for both teachers and pupils and may bring up difficult feelings. To help your new class or current class with the transition to a new year group and teacher, try these Zippy’s Friends and Apple’s Friends ideas at the end or beginning of term:

Ever since Zippy’s Friends was first trialled over 17 years ago, teachers have asked, ‘What’s next?’ After many years and stages of development, Apple’s Friends has been launched as the follow-up programme to Zippy. However, children don’t have to have done Zippy to do Apple – it can be run as a programme by itself.

Zippy’s Friends is now extremely successful and well known in Lithuania, with some 35% of all six to seven year-olds taking part in the programme. But ten years ago, this wasn’t the case at all, and times were tough for our NGO, Vaiko Labui.

When our partners send us their annual reports, we need to have accurate statistics on school, teacher and children numbers. But the bit we enjoy reading most are the stories which tell us, more than numbers, what Zippy and Apple can do for children. Here are a few of the most recent success stories from around the world.

While the main Zippy’s Friends folder has everything you need to teach the programme, don’t forget there are lots of great ideas for extending and enhancing activities in the Inclusion Supplement. These activities have been specially designed to ensure children in your class with special educational needs (SEN) can get the most out of the programme but can be beneficial for the whole class.

Lucy Stevens is the SENCO of Berry Hill Primary School in Gloucestershire. She has been running Apple’s Friends with a Year 3 class since November 2016. Read our interview with her.

Bullying is not only horrible to experience, but research shows it can have long-term detrimental effects on mental health.