Since Tim has come back from doing the Forest Kindergarten Training he has been working with the Early Years team to help them develop their skills.
He ran a pilot course with the combined nursery staff in Tong school and will be running a trainer course in November 2019.
Although the course is called forest it is not just aimed at forests, the training is aimed at helping early years practitioners to take the young people they work with outside more regularly.
The model used is to consider the Place, the People and the Pedagogy;
Considering the Place involves the suitability and the practical steps needed to manage the young people in the place.
The People thinks about who is involved; the young people, the staff, the carers/parents managing their needs and expectations.
Pedagogy is the how what and why we take young people outdoors
A possible visual model:
The objective it to show practitioners the connectivity and to challenge them to consider the elements in their own practice.
This is partly done inside through conversation, which because of time constraints is done inside.
The final session on pedagogy was done outside in the fantastic garden area of the school. The practitioners were given opportunity to play. This, apart from being great fun in the rain, highlighted for this group the importance of child lead learning and how few resources they needed as the environment provides them. They saw imaginative play, social skills development, gross motor skills, fine motor skills and peer learning happen within their own group and considered how they could use this in their own practice.
