“Strive to make everyday the best day of your life, because there is no good reason not to.” Hal Elrod
Consider seating; offering sofas to sit on that are a bit more comfy
A dining table to invite staff to come together over lunch
Lovely homely place mats
Plants
Photos in frames of things you’ve done together as a team (Parties, local walks, summer bbqs)
Soft warm lighting from lamps
Flowers in a vase on the table
A selection of teas and coffees
Fruit basket
Soft furnishings; cushions, throws
Lending library of books
Homely accessories- wicker hearts
Room spray
Declutter the space and organise
Fairy lights
Garlands (e.g felted leaves)
Calming colours whites and greys mixed in with some warmer yellows.
Consider how you might get as much...
Identify Negativity
What a delightful afternoon I’ve had. Sometimes we just visit places where everything we know and believe in (to do with early years) just happens!
As I arrived the Reception children were putting their full waterproof suits and welly boots on. “Its Bush craft afternoon!” I was told by an excited voice. “Yeah Mr Hemingway (From Pennine Bush Craft) and Meg (the Sheepdog) come every Monday and we get to play in the woods!”
Josh Hemingway is a trained in NCFE Level 4 qualification in Bushcraft Leadership at the Woodcraft School in Sussex and founder of Pennine Bushcraft. He delivers regular sessions in settings and schools which are focused around children having time and space to think, solve problems and build up key survival and life long skills.
As it had been a bit windy Mr Hemingway asking the children to help tidy up the woodland area. He carefully explained that the children needed to look for branches that had fallen down and then prop them up...
After seeing an article on using natural dye to colour the play dough we decided to give it a go with Dandelions. The field near us was about to be cut and so we rushed to collect as many daffodils as we could to use in our recipe before they were destroyed.
We love Dandelions and so do the bees! So it's really important that we don't take these away from the wildlife they support. As they come back year after year and have one of the longest flowering seasons of most plants many gardeners actually dislike their success and try and get rid of them!
To make our natural play dough we followed this recipe we found online;
Ingredients
Method
1. Consider your culture
Consider your role when it comes to promoting Literacy skills.
Identify Negativity
First identify what it is your feeling negative about. Make a list of all the solutions you can think of to solving the problem you have. Moving towards positivity and hope. Then commit yourself to taking one of these actions next time you feel this way.
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...
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