Spring Refresh.
Spring is most definitely in the air and what with us now being halfway through the academic year, is it time for you to stop, breathe, and reflect on how well your learning environment is meeting the needs of your cohort?
Does your early-year’s learning environment need a spring refresh?
As early years practitioners, we value how important the learning environment is to support the learning and development of our little learners. Having an enabling and stimulating environment that promotes curiosity, awe and wonder is a fundamental component of high-quality early years practice. Such a learning environment facilitates children to acquire key skills and knowledge when immersed in their child-initiated learning time.
Using your current assessment of your children’s learning will help you to reflect on what elements you need to adapt in your environment to help children make positive progress. After all, the well-respected Reggio Emilia approach identifies the learning environment as ‘the third teacher’ and so, it’s only right that we consider carefully how we might develop the learning environment to promote independent learning. An early years child wants to be welcomed every day by an opportunity to explore, imagine, investigate, and create in a space that promotes and facilitates a thirst for learning!
Let’s explore some simple ways to help you reflect on how to capture that ‘Spring Refresh’ across your learning environment.
Redesigning Role Play
Have you thought about redesigning your role-play area by involving the children in the entire process? Naturally, many wonderful practitioners spend considerable periods of time perfecting the picture-perfect role-play area ready for the children to step into. Instead, why not engage the children firstly by empowering them to vote for their desired role play and then by encouraging them to plan and design it. This might include empowering the children to paint, draw, or even write their own unique labels. Recently, I worked with my Nursery children to do just this, building a Pet Shop role play area with them. The children painted animal signs and made lists of the animals they would like to see in the Pet Shop and what accessories should be sold, including dog biscuits and fish food. They even insisted there should be a ‘doggy hairdresser’ in the Pet Shop too! The children were so engaged in the entire process which meant that when they came to finally playing in this zone and acting out narratives, they were so heavily invested resulting in higher levels of involvement in their play, thus higher levels of deep-level learning. We even arranged for the children to visit a ‘Pet Shop’ as part of the process.
Creative Construction!
Have you taken some time to consider if your construction zone is open-ended enough to promote your children’s thinking skills (which we know are vital tools to support their early reading and writing skills)? Adding some simple open-ended resources such as cardboard rolls from tissue rolls or even the cardboard rolls that you may collect when finishing a display border will provide children with a new resource to use to design, imagine, and problem-solve with. Other simple resources to add to your construction zone may include loose parts such as gems, bobbins, corks and log slices, nuts and bolts, and even peg dolls.
Wonderful Woodwork!
Now that we’re halfway through the year, no doubt you have a handful of children who need further support to develop their fine motor skills and, from experience, it’s often these children who are reluctant to want to mark make or pick up writing tools too. Why not think about focusing on developing these children’s physical literacy skills instead such as creating a woodwork area? Don’t fear, many practitioners that I mention the word ‘woodwork’ to think I’m mad but, speaking from experience, woodwork is the way forward to help promote many children’s fine motor skills. You can start off very small or go all out depending on your budget but either way, you will be providing children with a new opportunity to develop the skills they need for early writing. Pete Moorhouse has a wonderful book if you’d like to delve further into this area, ‘Learning through Woodwork’. Information regarding risk assessments is also available from Pete Moorhouse through his specific CPD available through his website https://irresistible-learning.co.uk Asking a local builders merchant to fill up your school bin with softwood, is a great tip for getting a free and consistent supply of wood. Start of small using pumpkins, small wooden hammers and golf tees to help children to practice their control and co-ordination skills and then start to add tools and wood. Why not consider auditing your parent body to see if anyone has skills or resources they could offer for free?
The Right Start to Writing!
Are you giving your children enough authentic writing opportunities across your learning environment to get them off to the right start in their early education? Take a moment to stop and observe your activity zones. Are your children wandering into writing opportunities in the same way you would expect them to be bumping into books when accessing the learning environment? Have you thought about adding writing belts to your construction zone, large-scale floor paper for children to roll out independently and mark make maps or design their plans? Do children have opportunities to label their junk models in the creative zone or display and label their models in the construction zone? Do you have a provocation set up that may entice children to guess what the item is that is linked to their current learning? I once set up a curiosity cube with an extremely old mobile phone inside with a host of writing implements such as post it notes, books and cards prominently positioned next to it. With some modeling from the adults at the start of the week, the children become hooked into making books to explain what they thought the object was. They were very proud to show and tell their mini books with the rest of the class. This encouraged their communication and language skills and of course, their confidence. Even just adding a simple display net beside your writing zone or creative area is an effective way to encourage children to want to mark make and proudly display their outcomes. After all is all about the process rather than the outcome in early years!
Creating those meaningful learning environments can be challenging to sustain throughout the year, so give yourself the permission this spring to stop, reflect and reassess how well your learning environment is helping your children to progress in their learning and development whilst also developing children who engage in deep level learning rather than passive learners.
If you would like some further advice on how to develop your indoor and outdoor learning environments, we would love to help. Feel free to drop us an email or complete the contact us form using the button below.