Blog

By Jennifer Wooldridge

@mamasden

How has your week been? I hope you have managed to have a think about what your top resources are in your homes? Finding fun ways to engage the children at home is really important at the moment and I for one am finding that keeping things simple is really working.

With us all restricted on our movements during lockdown we need to make the most of our daily exercise, enjoy the world around us and focus on fun times with our families. We have just celebrated Earth day 2020 which seems even more poignant this year with the focus worldwide being on the current pandemic.

I touched upon our love of natural play last week in my blog all about my top 5 resources so I thought this week I would elaborate on some ways we use nature, and share ideas for natural crafts. DIY crafting has been extremely popular on my social media channels this week so here is the method behind what we have created.

To evoke a sense of joy we have tried to capture a little bit of...

Story telling/ small world play and nature

As a setting we are always outside exploring the outdoors whether it be the beach, woods, National Trust places or simply our garden. We feel being outdoors is as important as introducing books and rhymes into the children’s every day life so why not combine the two. We do this regularly and will pack props and story books based on the themes and childrens interests into our daily bag and take them out with us.

We find that by using props out and about grasps the children’s attention a lot more than sitting and listening on a rug. The children want to be involved, they want to take turns to hold the props - they will also use the props to retell and re enact the story later on in their play. Recently we visited a local National Trust place and explored the mud kitchen - we took Tiger who came to Tea story with us as it is a favourite and we felt that this would link in beautifully with the physical play around the mud kitchen. We...

What happens next?

I was delighted to be part of a zoom conference on Sunday entitled ‘Which Way Now? Creating a Better Education System after Lockdown’. The panel consisted of speakers including EYFS, Primary, Secondary and Union Leaders; although they apologised for the lack of diversity within the panel and promised to be back with representatives from SEND and Post 16 amongst others. I listened with great interest to Elaine Bennett’s truly impassioned speech about the value and importance of the Early Years in education, and how we can use this horrendous experience to prompt big changes to our current system.

Elaine spoke at length about how the Early Years is at the forefront of education, but why? What is it we do so well? Well I think the Lockdown has highlighted a few key factors:

• We already value parents as playing a key role in children’s learning and have effective working partnerships with them. We understand that parents are experts in their child and are th
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By Jennifer Wooldridge @mamasden

Today marks the start of our next 3 weeks of lockdown but i’m hoping that the next 3 weeks are going to be easier than the first 3 weeks now that we have adjusted to our new normal, adopting a new rhythm and discovered our new routine. I am somehow managing to find time to engage the children including my son by including lots of nature play and science. I’m focusing our activities by playing to their strengths and following their interests.

I think that the main thing I will take from all of this is that my children can lead their own learning if I listen to their play and conversations and then throw in a little bit of sit down learning in line with this. But we are largely spending our time playing and learning in the moment and I really want this period of time to be reflected on as a fun family period rather than a scary, uncertain time.

So instead of focusing on one particular topic this week I thought I would share with you my top 5 lockdown r...

Mud play is enjoyed daily over here at Sam Goldsworthy Childminding. It is either explored at our local forest school, at the woods or in our setting garden. We feel it helps to connect the children to nature where they are enjoying the calmness of being outdoors and also builds up their childhood memories as well as being great for their immune system being out in mud and dirt!

We have a mud kitchen that was purpose built between our trees in the garden.  We have added many items such as weighing scales, cake tins, bun cases, saucepans and spoons as well as a range of natural items including shells, stones with different vegetables painted on them, pine cones and sticks.

We have noticed that this type of outdoor play encourages lots of learning opportunities to the children. These include rich language opportunities learning new words such as sticks, pine cones, berries etc - the children are communicating, negotiating, problem solving and listening to each other. It also inco...

Curiosity is a fundamental human trait. It’s a basic element of cognition, yet the biological function and neurological underpinning to this day remain poorly understood by scientists.

It can be very simply described as a desire to know or learn something. It’s that intrinsic drive towards ‘interesting’ situations, something peculiar, to find out about the world. How does it work? What will it do? Why is it there?

 But why? What is it about humans that make them curious? In its purest, caveman style form, learning about the world around us enables us to survive (except for cats, apparently curiosity kills them). We learn basic skills such as how and what to eat or drink, how to move to hunt and hide, how to stay warm and safe. And beyond this, we then learn how to thrive.

Now the world is rather different nowadays, and requires a completely different and far more complex range of skills (although I’m not sure which I personally deem to be more difficult - to chase down my dinne...

How do you resource opportunities for small world play? As an early years teacher I would ensure I had small world opportunities in every area of provision. For instance adding small world creatures and loose parts to my malleable area and observe how children make their own props for imaginative story telling. My maths area would also offer challenges around a small world problem in KS1 provision. ‘Like the pirates have found some coins and have to make a total of 20 for Captain Blackbeard by adding coins together.’

Here are some of my top ingredients for resources and organisation.

-Offer small world and block play together.
-Add collections of loose parts to encourage creativity and imaginative story telling. See right brained mom for ideas.
-Foliage- real and artificial
-Add a light element; projectors, light box, rope lights and fairy lights.
-Take small world outside and use natural settings
-Mirrors
-Mark making equipment available
-peg people
-Offer different backgrounds like woven p...

If you don’t know by now, children and colours are like sunshine and the seaside- they can’t be imagined one without the other. I can remember the faces and personalities of some of the only children I’ver met who didn’t enjoy colour mixing. They were those children who would watch on act a safe distance; making connections, eyeing mixing techniques suspiciously, and delighting in the joy of others as they played. Perhaps not in Nursery, but certainly by Reception, these children would have joined in, whether it be for only a minute, or many many days of carefully considered work.

Unaided and unprompted, children see blobs of primary colours as invitation enough to mix. We have all placed, at some point in our teaching life, paints in beautiful pre-mixed palettes, awaiting children to paint a Picasso-esque masterpiece, only to find them making brown for the millionth time with a brush stirring in either hand. Whilst this genius of fine-motor control should be applauded, it can be ...

How has your week been? Did you find your new rhythm or at least start to think about the changes you are making in your daily life to get yourself into the new swing of things? I hope you enjoyed my take on daily rhythm which I shared with you last week. This week I want to talk to you about getting that rhythm into your children’s lives and particularly how I’m engaging my son into our activities.

Some people find it harder to get boys to engage in work than girls but forget the typical stereotypes surrounding boys as they are truly just myths and the best way to engage your boy is to play to his interests. Talk to them, find out what excites them and what they actually want to learn about.

I have worked with lots of boys over my childminding career. I think I have looked after more boys than girls in actual fact. Each child has been completely unique. Their interests have differed and also their own personality attributes. Typically boys are headstrong and independent. They are...

Emotional strength is a funny old subject. I mean, what even is it? And how do we get it ourselves, let alone instil it into others? 

It’s generally agreed that there is a rise worldwide in mental health issues, particularly amongst children and young adults. But I can’t help questioning the figures we base this on. According to data, about 13% of the global population, some 971 million people, are currently suffering from some kind of mental disorder. But… is this new? Or are we just more aware of it? Is it now more acceptable to admit that we’re struggling? Are there now more avenues we can access for help? Are we now perhaps more socially aware and recognise that men or children can have issues too? Dementia is apparently the fastest-growing mental illness but is it? Or are we living longer and therefore there are just more age-related issues in the demographic?

In all honesty I can’t quite formulate an answer to all these questions in my own head, but what I really do believe ...