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

Leading with Optimism

May 16, 2019

Feeling more optimistic has a link to our level of positivity and happiness. When we feel more optimistic we approach a task with increased confidence and strength that it will go well. Yet it's really easy to get stuck in a cycle of self-doubt when it comes to things going wrong.

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.

For me my house sale has recently fallen though. My initial thought was “Oh no this is terrible what are we going to do now. Then I turned the situation around and thought well at least now we have more time to find our dream home (as we were about to move in with relatives), I'm saving money (as our next house will be bigger and have a more expensive mortgage) and lastly, I'm feeling tired so at...

"No Time to Play"

May 16, 2019

Do you sometimes feel like you're not spending quality time interacting and playing with the children? Perhaps it often feels like you're jumping from one task to the next or having constant interruptions for children that need help.

Two things I used to find helpful.

1. Take 10- 15 minutes standing back in your provision during an average day. Watch what's going on and make a note of every time a child comes up to you and asks you a question. At the end of your 10 minutes look at the list of questions you've had. What do they tell you? 'Can I have some glue?', 'Where is my coat?' or 'I can't find the sellotape?' Then consider your learning environment and think about what you need to do to support the children's independence. If there is something children are generally finding tricky like using scissors run a masterclass on this.

2. I also used to organise myself and my team in a loose rota. (This would have some degree of flexibility due to...

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...

How much planning should I do?

May 09, 2019

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...

Guest Post: Documenting Children's Learning

Apr 30, 2019

We are very lucky to have a fabulous guest post this week from inspirational Reception teacher Elizabeth Jobson. This week we will explore child led learning in her Reception class... her truly favourite place to be in education.

I am a big fan of child initiated and interest led learning; applying this to my practice daily. I make this evident in my classroom in a range of ways; one of them being my displays. I feel the reading area is one of the most important areas in the classroom and it must be cosy, calm and filled with books relevant to the current topic so children can further their learning and understanding in their independent learning time. This year, I decided on a simple display. All it took was some yarn and mini pegs. At the end of each week, I print out the covers of the books we have read. It is such an easy display to keep up with but look how effective it looks. I leave the books in the reading area until the end of the topic/half term and the...

How to teach children to respect resources

Apr 29, 2019

“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...