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“Strive to make everyday the best day of your life, because there is no good reason not to.” Hal Elrod

'The Hygge in the Early Years Accreditation has been a journey of personal growth and enrichment in my life-long learner journey.'

Oct 28, 2021

Member Case Study by Vania Almeida

The Hygge in the Early Years Accreditation has been a journey of personal growth and enrichment in my life-long learner journey. My name is Vania Almeida and I heard about hygge and KSEY’s work last year in a webinar when Vicky Murray, a childminder in England, presented the benefits of using the approach in her setting. I searched about it and I decided to join the accreditation in January 2020. I have been completing different trainings since I started my career in Early Years seven years ago, although I work in Education for nearly 15 years. The pandemic context led me to invest a lot in my self-development. I became first time manager last year and my intention was for the accreditation to help me create a hygge environment in a setting that was everything but hygge – very urban, colourful, depressive and empty. I had only two children enrolled and one staff member. I will share very few photos from this setting but I feel most of the work happened...

Challenge in Provision

May 13, 2019

Is It Possible To Create Challenge In Your Provision?

I inherited organised, well-resourced and labelled provision.

But it wasn’t enough!

It looked great and could be tidied up easily.

Yet something wasn’t right…

The play in my sand area from my Reception children was low level play; tipping, pouring and making sand castles. Running race cars round the edge of the tray.

This provision was not making an impact on my children’s learning. I needed to look at the area through a fresh set of eyes. How could I inject challenge? What did my children need?

I began to make some changes.

We enhanced the area with loose parts and blocks so that children could build their own scenes, number pebbles, scrabble alphabet tiles, natural resources like sticks and pine cones. I added in small world resourcing; insects, desert creatures, play people, pirates and play villains and heroes. All of these encouraged imag...