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Documenting the learning that the children are doing is part of the process of being an early years educator. However we don't want to be doing too much that it takes us away from the child and the importance of the learning. 

What exactly is documentation? This is the process of recording down the child's learning and responding to this in a way as an educator that allows us to deepen their level of learning or provide challenge. 

Although we have many visitors of the blog working internationally, we also have a large proportion of visitors working here in the U.K and with the revised EYFS curriculum as of of September 2021. 

Having worked with many educators here in England over the last year, it has come up in many discussions that under the new EYFS 'there is no requirement to document children's learning.'

In this blog post I want to reflect on the value of high quality observations and unpick why there is still a place for these in our every day early years practice. 

The Gr...

I know through my interactions with you online that many of you would like a little bit of support in setting up a provocation. 

Firstly I hear you ask, what is a provocation? A provocation can come in many different forms, but it is always intended to provoke thoughts, ideas, and actions that can help to expand on a thought, project, idea or an interest. These are an important aspect of child led learning seen in the Reggio Emilia Approach. By setting up a provocation we are allowing young children to see, experience and make decisions about the world themselves through their own explorations. It could be from a book, a photograph, interesting objects. The interaction with the provocation can involve problem solving, working imaginatively, form new ideas and make their own conclusions. 

As the provocations are open ended with the concept of the child finding their own answers rather than being told them there is no right or wrong outcome from working here. The process of the learnin...

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 we...