This is a question that I often asked myself!

Lets go back in time to when I first started teaching...

Each half term we would have a different topic to focus our learning on (Transport, fairy tales or as these photos showed-Celebrations). Every week within the half term the main topic would be broken down into a weeks mini topic (e.g Chinese New Year).

Every Friday I would stay at school till 6:30pm setting up my provision so that it was ready for the following week. This would involve dressing up each area of learning around that theme. Prior to that my week day evenings had been taken up preparing for this Friday dressing by printing, laminating, double backing images and sourcing resources to support each area. Gosh it was exhausting!

On Mondays when the children went into the provision I would always feel disappointed that they weren't using it in the way I had planned for. At times levels of engagement were low or children would ask me where the lego was (We had it out the...

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

― Alexander Den Heijer

For those of you that have been following me for a while now you’ll know that I spent a long period of time working in a challenging Bradford school Nursery. Many children were vulnerable to learning, they started with us typically well below average and they needing a high level of support and nurture to thrive.

At the time in our setting we had a mixture of plastic and natural resources. When I worked in the setting I would find that the resources would be mixed up, transported around the room or children would often walk away from an area without setting it back up for the next person. I often found that the plastic resources were the ones that were dropped on the floor because there was no real consequence of the resource breaking.

This would frustrate me greatly… especially when I looked on Instagram and...