Blog

With Easter upon us shortly it's easy to get back into the habit of dressing each area of provision for the celebration. 

Instead focus on leaving a few hooks in your adult initiated sessions that will grab your children's interest and lead them curious to know more. It could be sharing an Easter story for instance and then having one or two areas of your provision with provocations in linked to this. This then invites the child to explore and learn more. It also means that children that don't want to explore this can still head into the areas of provision to develop their own lines of enquiry or take the lead on their own child led play. 

Taking this approach also frees you as an adult up from spending so much time filling every area of provision with resources and instead can really prioritise your time and focus your efforts on the things that will make the biggest impact. 

With this in mind I wanted to take the opportunity to share some of the provocations and hooks that I h...

Light play provides some excellent opportunities in your setting for children show some natural curiosity around science, engineering and wonder. Here are some resources you might like to audit your lighting play for…

• Light box
• Over head projector
• Torches (range of coloured lights)
• Shadow Puppets

Variety of loose parts to add to your light box;

• Shiny and reflective resources
• Coloured glass gems
• Twigs of varying lengths
• Mirrors
• Foliage
• Small world characters and buildings
• Plastic ice cubes
• Coloured counters
• Sweet wrappers/ cellophane
• Coloured cocktail stirrers
• Coloured plastic shot glasses
• Variety of buttons
• Paper doilies
• Numicon

Creative opportunities on the light box;

• Water beads
• Paint
• Black sand
• Eco glitter
• Clay
• Shaving foam

Don't miss out on the amazing opportunity to learn more about nature play here 

How do you create and celebrate the moments of joy that come throughout the year?

I like to create a nature shelf in the entrance to our setting that can be used as a way of creating a wonderful sense of arrival for young children and their families. It encourages discussion and a love for what is seen and experienced in the world around us. With a hope of making children and their families more present and strengthening the connections between home and setting. By encouraging children to add their natural treasures to this working display or observations.

Here is a winter themed Nature shelf that I set up at the beginning of December last year. It simply had an artificial tree, Pussy Willow in a tall vase, pine cones and Holly collected by the children, twinkly lights to bring the enchantment and then the wonderful book Pick and Pine Tree by Patricia Toht. This book is a delightful read about a family choosing and decorating their own Christmas tree- offering many discussion point...

This week we have the fabulous Hollie (also known as Bags of Beans!) who will be giving us a wonderful insight into how she's created calm in her year 1 classroom. I'm sure you will see that there are many hygge elements to this as well!

My obsession with classroom environments began when I first visited St John’s C of E Primary School. From the moment I walked in I was struck by the calm atmosphere and serenity it brought to their children. My colleague and I whispered to each other is disbelief “it’s just so calm”. Upon walking back into my own classroom I was smacked in the face with bright colours and loud noises! Everything felt over stimulating and busy by comparison; as if there were balls of high energy bouncing around the walls! From then onwards I was hooked into finding ways of calming my classroom and moulding the environment to generate the same serene feeling I’d experienced at St John’s.

I began with the lights! First of all, I wanted to reduce the lighti...

We are so incredibly lucky this week to be joined by the highly creative Zoë a Reception Lead Teacher. We are going to be looking at how we can resource to create curiosity, intrigue and excitement and then use this as a hook to deepen levels of learning. 

Finding the perfect items to enhance my Reception setting has been a labour of love and turned into a real passion and perhaps a little bit of an obsession! I scour the second hand venues and sales, charity shops, local selling pages and car boot sales as well as eBay, Wish, Amazon. Wherever I am I consider how I can use these items to enhance my provision; to bring an element of wonder,  to create an aspect of curiosity that goes beyond picking something up for the first time. This intrigue will fuel imagination,  invite a friend along for the journey,  transform into something completely new or take them to a once uninhabited place. Sometimes it is an unbelievable bargain that cannot be passed up on. I think I have a collecto...