Welcome to Term 1 of 2023/24 everyone! 

We wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the methods our team use to share valuable information with you, as well as how and where you can access it.

 

Early Years Bulletins:

Our Early Years Bulletins are sent out on a monthly basis to our Head of Centres, Managers and Head teachers, and are also available to access on Glow.   The bulletins contain up to date information from our team, Care Inspectorate updates, important dates for your diary and any policy changes you need to be aware of.

Falkirk Early Learning – CLPL and Local Information (sharepoint.com).

 

CLPL Calendar and CPD Manager:

Our Early Years CLPL calendar was emailed to settings on the 28^th June 2023.  This can also be accessed on Glow and is where you will find our teams CLPL offering this year.

Falkirk Early Learning – CLPL and Local Information (sharepoint.com).

This includes:

• Dates and content for all Leadership, PEYO and SEYO forums
• A list of CLPL available for practitioners at all levels
• Bespoke CLPL you can request for your full team
• CLPL for all support staff
• Play is the Way opportunities
• Froebelian practice support
• Self-directed materials
• Ideas hours
• 30 minute updates.

It is important to be selective as to the professional learning that supports your own or your settings improvement priorities which you may choose to complete as a full staff team or individually.

The majority of our courses are available to sign up for on CPD Manager. If you cannot find a course; wish further information about forums; or to arrange bespoke training, please speak to your cluster link teacher or the course organiser.

Falkirk CPD (cpdservice.net)

Please note, some of our CLPL will be delivered using a hybrid learning approach. Here you will have the option to attend in-person with the presenter, or to watch the course remotely via a live-stream on Microsoft Teams. Please make sure you sign up for your preferred option, “in person” or “online”. This also allows us to monitor candidate numbers and delivery preferences across our range of CLPL programmes.

Our self-guided CLPL continues to be available on our Glow Sharepoint. As always, we would encourage you to discuss any CLPL you take part in with your colleagues afterwards and review the impact this learning has had on your practice.

Falkirk Early Learning – CLPL and Local Information (sharepoint.com)

 

Blogs:

Our Falkirk Early Learning Blog is where you can access key information about our team, key information for our practitioners and our blog posts.  The blog posts are completed and uploaded on an ongoing basis from our team, other services who work alongside us or guest blogs from our practitioners.  You can subscribe to the blog to ensure you receive a notification when a new blog post is uploaded by following the link at the bottom of the page on the left-hand side.

Falkirk Early Learning – Our Children First – Falkirk Council Children’s Services (glowscotland.org.uk)

 

 

Twitter and Facebook:

Please follow us at @FCEYTeam on Twitter where we post on a daily basis.  Here you will find information such as: CLPL information, guidance on grants available, up to date information from Education Scotland and Care Inspectorate, as well as any important information you need to be aware of from our team.  We also love to see all the great work you are all doing in your settings so please tag us in your posts.

 

You may prefer to join our private Facebook group for practitioners from Falkirk ELC settings and private partner providers. This contains similar information to our Twitter page and offers a safe place to ask colleagues questions or share ideas.

Falkirk Council EY Sharing Group | Facebook

 

 

Glow Sharepoint:

Our Glow Sharepoint is your go to space for accessing a wide range of documents and guidance. The Falkirk Early Learning page is organised into 5 sections:

• Leadership and Management
• Learning, Teaching and Assessment
• Falkirk Initiatives and approaches
• Parental engagement and family learning
• CLPL and general information

In each section you will find up to date guidance, examples, templates and communication from our service, e.g. posters and bulletins,  which you can access and make use of.  Please familiarise yourself with this page and get in touch with your cluster link teacher if you need any support.

Please also consider signing up for our CLPL session on Thursday 14^th September from 3.30 – 4pm with Kerry Abercrombie who will share guidance on how to access and make the best use of Glow.  Please sign up for the session via CPD Manager.

Falkirk Early Learning – Home (sharepoint.com)

 

 

 

Hello

I am Kerry Abercrombie your Curriculum Development Officer – Digital Learning for Falkirk Council. My role is to support education establishments in the development and implementation of approaches, pedagogies and practices which make effective use of digital technologies to enhance learning and teaching experiences for children and young people.

While I come from a secondary Media and English background I am firmly of the belief that the Early Years is a fundamentally important stage in the journey of all learners. This may well have been drummed into me by my mother – and now also my sister – who are both passionate Early Years practitioners. But more likely it comes from a lifelong love of playing, storytelling and creativity which began in my own early years and has steadfastly stuck with me (despite adulthood’s best efforts to knock the wonder out of us)!

Play, storytelling and creativity are also where my digital learning interests are based. While games apps and researching on the internet are absolutely valid uses of digital tools, when we move to from consuming to creating with digital tools we unlock so much more potential for rich play and learning experiences for children and young people. Digital devices can open up creative experiences that might previously have been limited by budget or access to materials and equipment. Think of an iPad not as a device – but as a camera, a drumkit, a paint set, a library, a magnifying glass, a video recorder, a piano, a microphone, a rainbow of coloured pens and pencils – the list goes on and on.

A large part of my role is planning and delivering professional learning opportunities to help staff build their skills and confidence in using digital tools for learning and teaching. The Digital Learning Team at Falkirk Council and I do this through either DigiLearnFalk (@DigiLearnFalk), Connected Falkirk (@ConnectedFalk) or the Falkirk Apple Regional Training Centre (@FalkirkRTC) where we provide both in person or online sessions as well as a range of asynchronous support content that can be accessed anytime, anywhere.

You might have noticed a change in the types of offers related to digital learning both locally and nationally. As the use of digital technologies becomes more embedded and the understanding of the multifaceted potential of apps and softwares are developing, we are seeing a move away from tool based sessions (where you might learn the basics of one particular tool) towards more thematic or pedagogy based sessions. Connected Falkirk, The Falkirk Apple Regional Training Centre and DigiLearnFalk run sessions not on Keynote, Glow or Teams but rather on things like retrieval practice, feedback, accessibility and play. We also run a range of Connected Falkirk Challenge Tasks for learners on Twitter and provide ideas and resources for educators on the DigiLearnFalk website. We are always willing to make things that will help people so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any ideas!

I am also thrilled to point you in the direction of the new Education Scotland digital education support site for Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) by DigiLearnScot. Which has a wide variety of useful information and signposting. We are delighted to have Eva Wilkinson from Education Scotland who is the Early Years colleague behind this site as one of our RIC supporters for all things digital for our tiniest of techies!

While I’ve given you lots of things to click and look at here, sometimes when you’re trying to get going on your digital journey you just want someone to talk it all through with. Supporting individual establishments and leadership teams is also part of my remit and I would be delighted to talk with any of you about where you might want to go with digital learning. Please, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via email or Glow. The door is always open!

 

 

Hi, I am Claire Lord, PEYO at Inchlair ELC Centre. In September 2022, our 3 – 5 year olds moved from Larbert ELC Centre to Inchlair ELC Centre where we began our journey to become Falkirk’s first Froebel Flagship nursery. We went from having four small playrooms to one large playroom. As a team we had to think what matters to our children, families, and staff in line with Froebelian principles. Ensuring that all aspects of children’s personal plans were enabling for the whole team to get it right for every child.

Through participation and gathering our communities’ perspective (children, families, and educators) it became clear that the current proposed information gathering template of personal plans did not suit our children and families for several reasons e.g., too many boxes. We felt that the document needed to align with our new setting vision, values and Froebelian principles. So, we decided to observe how children were using it and how it was meaningful to them.

The findings showed that the format of the template didn’t offer enough personalisation to each child. Some families informed us at the transition stage they felt overwhelmed. Another parent told us it “felt like a test.”  Many of our families said they felt under pressure to say what they thought we wanted to hear. Some of the answers given were not appropriate. A percentage of our families shared they have limited literacy skills so struggled to complete aspects, which they did not want to disclose at the beginning of forming relationships with staff.

So, we reflected as a team on our transition policy and procedures from home to nursery and realised it was information overload for families. We have learned it is key that relationships with children, families and educators are at the foundation of everything we do, and each child and their family are individual. In addition, the team reviewed and revised paperwork, including our information brochure, to enable all aspects of personal plans to become more meaningful for each child.

Where we are now? We streamlined personal plans taking out information which we felt wasn’t required at initial transition stage and completed paperwork over time, as and when relevant.

Our Children & Families Thoughts – The document is less daunting as number of pages reduced. Less boxes to complete so answers are quick and more accurate. Families are now more open and happier to provide more information over time where keyworkers complete with families together to support building up relationships and attuning to each child and family.

Overall, the revised document has been received well. Moving forward we will continue to review and reflect to ensure this always meets the needs of our children and families.

Feel free to contact me on claire.lord@falkirk.gov.uk or 01324 503430 to discuss further.

 

We started our ‘What Matters to Me’ journey at Sacred Heart when we were still operating in bubbles during Covid. It was easy to see it was more important than ever at this time to really show we were listening to our children and their families – access to the nursery was heavily restricted, transitions were more complicated, and the wellbeing of the children, although always at the forefront of what we do, became even more significant. Over the last couple of years, the ‘What Matters to Me’ initiative has grown and evolved into a vital part of our everyday life at Sacred Heart ELC.

‘What Matters to Me’ is a large part of our transition process. We discuss children’s interests with their families before we meet them, enabling us to arrive on home visits fully prepared, not just with paperwork, but with items from nursery which link to what is important to them at that time. This hopefully sets the scene for the child and plants the seed that, it might be worth popping along to nursery later that week for a better look! First visits to nursery can be daunting for both children and their families. After gaining more information at the home visit, we can create ‘home comforts’ for those first steps into unfamiliar territory. This could be a basket of dinosaurs, bright green playdough with sparkles in it, a favourite book, a favourite song, a football, basically anything that has been highlighted as a child’s special interest or which provides them comfort.

During a child’s time with us we continue to use the information provided by families to plan experiences, spaces and interactions which meet the child’s individual needs. However, we also closely observe them to notice new interests and experiences with which the child shows engagement and excitement. We also discover personal preferences for certain situations, for example, a child who prefers to eat at the end of lunch when there are less people about or who prefers to spend a bit of extra time in the cloakroom in the morning before coming in to join the rest of the group. We can then adapt the environment, introduce different resources, plan new experiences, and approach interactions differently, always keeping ‘what matters’ to that child at the heart of what we do.

We have used children’s interests to create opportunities for others to try out new experiences. A game of football on the grassy area in the school grounds is always a winner, not just for those with an interest in football. We had one child with an interest in golf, and created a crazy golf course in the garden which had the longest queue of children waiting for a turn, all demonstrating just how patient they could be! Confidence is built when children demonstrate skills they have learnt outside of nursery to their friends. We have had children being gymnasts, dancers and Tae kwon do instructors, proudly showing their friends what they can do and encouraging them to have a go.

At the start of this academic year, we introduced our ‘What Matters to Me’ walls. Every child has space where they can display photos, pictures, and anything else they want to share with others. These walls have become an area of great interest for the children, and they enjoy leading their families, and any visitors to nursery, over to have a look. They take interest not only in their own spaces but also those of their friends. When wall spaces are full everything is transferred to the children’s ‘What Matters to Me’ books which are easily accessible in the nursery for the children and their families to look at, or add to, any time they wish.

             

Our ‘What Matters to Me’ journey so far has really shown us the importance of listening and acting on what we see/hear. We know and understand so much more about the children and their families, which has had a positive impact on both vertical and horizontal transitions. Children seem to be settling quicker and feeling more at home (perhaps evident in the amount of shoeless feet we see 😊). As we look forward to August, there will be opportunities for us to further develop and improve ‘What Matters to Me’ through observation, discussion, and collaboration with the new cohort of children, continuing our journey and continuing to put the children at the centre of what we do every day.

 

 

At Carmuirs ELC we pride ourselves in ensuring Children’s rights are at the heart of our practice.

We have adopted a rights-based approach, ensuring that our children are respected and valued as individuals. To do this we use the wellbeing indicators to ensure that children’s rights are met through everyday experiences.

A different wellbeing indicator is chosen as a focus for each week and shared with the children. We introduce the language and discussing what it means. Each time a practitioner observes children demonstrating the focus wellbeing indicator they would praise and reinforce how the experience/ interaction matches the wellbeing indicator by using the language.

Here are just a few examples of how we link the indicators to UNCRC articles:

Article 19 – We have the right to be safe and protected from harm. As the children sit around the firepit we introduce safe rules to them. We discuss that by sitting far enough away from the fire they are being safe.

Article 24 – The right to clean water and food – We include the children in preparing snack and mealtimes this gives us the opportunity to discuss being healthy. We also have a water station available all day for the children to access and again we would be reinforcing the language of healthy.

Article 31 – the right to play – At Carmuirs our children have the freedom to play either indoors or outdoors.  The outdoor area is open all day. When engaging in the outdoors children can participate in a variety of play including active, risky, imaginative, creativity and curiosity.  We use the local community, woods, and parks to further promote being active.

We reinforce the language of being responsible, looking after and respecting their environment by inviting and encouraging children to help tidy resources away.

Practitioners are always on hand to help by being positive role models and supporting the children to be included during their chosen activities. Practitioners use language that incorporates the wellbeing indicators such as ‘Let us include our friends. They have the right to join us too.’

We are so proud of how our children have taken this on board and it is great to hear children use this language confidently in their everyday play.

So, what is next for Carmuirs ELC?

• We are learning a SHANARRI song to help us remember the words.
• The wellbeing indicator emoji’s will be added to displays, allowing the children to make a visual connection between the spoken word and print.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone has a Voice 

 

Hello! I’m Kimberley Talbot, Senior EYO at Bowhouse ELC.

At Bowhouse, we have a commitment to support and enable all our children to play, learn and grow on a unique and individual journey of success. Through critical reflection, we identified the use of effective strategies and intervention as a top priority for development. This ensured all children would have a platform to express their wants, needs and views and build capacity for all children’s voice, promoting a rights respecting provision.

Enabling practice to promote the voices with no words

In session 2022/23, practitioners engaged in full team professional learning and development. This ensured there was a consistent approach to intervention and strategies which encompassed a shared vision for high quality care and education. Our increased knowledge and understanding allowed us to offer supportive strategies to our parents and families and build upon trusting and informative relationships.

We have a commitment to building capacity for children’s voice. Article 12 of the UNCRC empowers children to have freedom and respect, to voice their opinion and be heard. This article identifies our responsibility to enable children to have a holistic and appropriate medium to exercise this right. However, our children who are not yet using words and/or have barriers for communication often have difficulty exercising their rights.

We designed a professional learning plan that would promote collaboration and partnership working whilst nurturing a shared vision for success. We collaborated with Speech and Language therapy and Educational Psychology to enable our environment to be communication rich and for our interactions to promote language development and social-emotional abilities.

We embarked on a year-long journey of Adult Child Interaction (ACI) training and SCERTS Model training. This training has enabled practitioners to meet the needs of all children with a universal approach and provided a platform for targeted and individualised supports for children with communication difficulties. We now have a deeper understanding of how to support social communication and emotional regulation by ensuring experiences and spaces are predictable and desirable. Thus, providing high quality care and education that promotes self-identity and inclusion.

We have provided children with objects of reference to support transitions within the session and enable them to make choice and express opinion. These objects have become a vehicle for self-expression and provide a visual learning support for children not yet using words.

The objects are resources that are meaningful to each child and mirror our What Matters to Me? approach. For example, one child identifies a box of ‘Moshi Monsters’ as a self-regulation tool.

Another child uses a bag of resources as their way of communicating they would like 1-1 time.

 

This professional learning identified that children benefit most when engaged in stimulating interactions that are led by the child and facilitated by practitioners imitating their communication and adding in language as the interaction deepens.

Trusting and enabling relationships have grown, with practitioners becoming more in-tune to the communication and emotional needs of each child. This has led to children with ASN being able to successfully communicate their wants, needs and views by using gestures, expressions and movements that are understood by the adults and learners within the setting.

Child-centred policies influence our practice and ensure all practitioners offer children experiences and opportunities that are guided by their individual dispositions and pathways for learning. This gives individual platforms for self-expression and a variety of modes for information gathering outlined in article 13.

In October 2022, Bowhouse ELC were awarded GOLD for our visual environment. Enabling leadership, across our improvement priorities, practitioners took the responsibility of upskilling themselves with Boardmaker and were able to provide a variety of visual supports for our environment. These visuals also took the form of ‘real life’ images to support the developmental needs of our children as both social partners and language partners. This ensured our children who were not yet using words and/or had difficulty understanding and following routine, would have ample visual aids to support their social communication and transitions. We are now working towards a diamond award for our spoken environment.

                               

Promoting children’s rights through continuous provision

We exercise and explore children’s rights through our continuous provision. Through our Book of the Moment and role play provision, children are encouraged to express their creativity, imagination, and knowledge independently. This session, we used “Daisy Eat Your Peas” as a catalyst for our children to express their likes and dislikes. We used a variety of technology to take photographs of all the areas and resources within the ELC, enabling the children to express their ideas and share their views. We then printed them off and displayed them on the wall. We used the colour monster characters ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ as a visual aid to gather the views of each child.

A golden thread was evident throughout the planning cycle showing that the children’s voice was clear and visible. Children had a platform to build capacity and have their wants and views heard. As a setting, we continue to consult with children on what they’d like to learn and engage with amongst their spaces. A focus on article 12 of UNCRC was adopted as a catalyst for our provision moving forward. On the children’s planning wall, there is a visual chart that enables children to express their views and inform their learning.

An example of this was within Marvellous Mealtimes, our children created and implemented their weekly menu and shopping lists. Visual aids continued to support all communication abilities and our families were consulted to build upon an inclusive approach to provision.

 

Our vision is for all children to exercise their rights and build capacity for all voices whether they are spoken or physical.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi, we are the team at Beancross ELCC.

We would like to take this opportunity to share al aspects of our personal plans in digital format.

In August 2022, as part of self-evaluation, parental feedback, and identifying our improvement priorities we hoped to increase parental involvement with children’s learning by transitioning to digital Learning Journeys. Common feedback received was that the biggest barrier to families being involved in children’s learning was that they physically had to come into the nursery to view their Learning Journeys – transitioning to digital has ensured that families that cannot come in can still be involved as equally as those that can come into the setting. To transition to digital all staff were provided with iPads and Apple Pens, and together we created a new format for recording children’s individual significant learning – on PowerPoint Presentation. The introduction of learning journeys on a digital platform inspired us to transfer all other paperwork within a child’s personal plan on to digital platform.

As a team, we knew we wanted all aspects of the personal plans to run seamlessly on the digital platform, as – included within the plan – the WMTM is the first source of information we obtain, allowing us to Get It Right for Every Child right from the beginning of their nursery journey. We took the original template provided and recreated it to fit the format of our new Journeys.

We removed all sensitive information from the digital platform and have this stored separately. We use images and children’s drawings as much as possible to engage children in their learning.

We feel the benefits of a digital Personal Plans include:

• • • Staff can update and edit instantly.
    • SEYO can airdrop Learning Journeys/WMTM to audit without preventing the children/staff from accessing them.
    • Photos and videos can be added to support children’s input and understanding.
    • Reduces the risk of them being damaged or lost.
    • No intimidating template putting families under pressure to fill all boxes/have answers for everything.
    • Freedom of creativity for staff and child
    • Families can access them at a time that suits their needs.
    • Parental feedback/comments can be added easily
    • Children can access their journeys through their personal QR code
    • Children’s progress can be tracked and updated immediately after focus child meetings.
    • 6 week and 6-month reviews can be updated instantly ensuring that we are capturing changes in the child’s progress.

Please find attached the QR code to Lewis’s Learning Journey if you would like to have a look.

 

Hello! We are the under threes team at Borrowstoun ELCC.

We would like to share our journey in developing our Marvellous Meals with you.

 

 

To take our Marvellous Meals journey forward we initially came together as a team and spent some time discussing what the team, as a whole, could do to develop our snack and lunchtimes. This meant the team could share individual knowledge and values and develop a shared vision of our Marvellous Meals approach. We felt this was the best way to ensure the continuity of nurture, care and development we all want for our children.

What was really important to the team was enabling the children to have autonomy within and around daily snacks and lunches. Choosing what they were going to have for lunch or snack and being supported to prepare and self-serve their choice of foods, all in a relaxed, calm atmosphere with soft lighting and music. This consistent approach we implemented has meant a successful transition during snacks and lunches, where our children have developed their self-help skills. They can independently wash their hands or faces at the beginning and end of their meals, set the table, self-serve their lunch and clear away their utensils, all in an unhurried atmosphere. We have recently set up a new outdoor area for lunches, further expanding the children’s choice, making the transition as comfortable as possible and building on our children’s confidence.

As a team we celebrate our children’s achievements and take pride in facilitating a positive and nurturing homely environment. Our latest focus with snacks and meals is introducing positive associations with foods, empowering all children to choose what and when they would like to eat and sit for lunch.  This helps us to ensure an inclusive approach to Marvellous Meals experience, where all our children choices are respected.  This is working well with our children with additional support needs who previously would choose not join in with meal and snack times.

ou enjoy our video of Archie, one of our wee two year olds during his lunch journey! Our marvellous Meal Lead, Louisa, and some of the team share what our approach means to us.

https://youtu.be/jEbR2cpvbp0

Marvellous Mealtimes Blog

Environments

Hi, I’m Jennifer Laverty and I’m the SEYO at Avonbridge ELC Class. This blog will explore the journey we took to develop our mealtime environment and embed the Marvellous Mealtime values into our setting.

We began our Marvellous Mealtime journey in April 2021 and since then have been privileged to have the support of some amazing practitioners including Donna Green and Gemma Paterson. At the beginning of our journey, we reflected on how we embed the Marvellous Mealtimes values into the space. We wanted mealtimes to be relaxed and unhurried and to be a positive social experience for our wee people.

Initially we identified the need for a new round table and chairs instead of the rectangular table with benches. We felt that most of our children struggled to sit still on the benches which created lots of spills and accidents. The circle table made an immediate improvement and we felt that children were more relaxed when eating and had more opportunities to chat to everyone at the table. This created an overall more relaxed and unhurried mealtime experience.

We then looked at the surrounding environment of the mealtime space and introduced natural backing, some soft lighting, and plants to create a nurturing space. The use of tablecloths and flowers for the centre of the table promote a more home like environment.

Literacy, in particular the vocabulary, is part of our Improvement Plan and so a big part of our mealtimes is to ensure that we are promoting social interactions to develop literacy skills. We added children’s family photos to the space to add a piece of home for them. These photos are great at promoting positive interactions between the children as well as the adults during mealtimes and throughout the day.

We took feedback from our Marvellous Mealtimes support, Tracey Sharples, and looked at what areas of development have been recommended including the introduction of smaller glass jugs to reduce spills and face cloths to promote independent face washing after meals. We have also received support from our Community Speech and Language Therapist who has completed a visual environment audit and will be supporting us on ways to include more stage appropriate visuals to support our learners at mealtimes.

With Marvellous Meals, it’s essential to find a way that works for your setting. As one of the smallest settings in the council we have found that systems that may work for other settings don’t quite fit for us and we have continued to develop our mealtime space and provision over the last 2 years. We have tried different things, some that have worked, some that haven’t. We have had to adapt the environment to suit the needs of our wee people as children leave and new children start. It has been an evolving process and we are always reflecting on ways to improve.

Before                                           After 

 

Glendevon Early Learning and Childcare Centre

Marvellous Mealtimes “Do It Yourself Deli”

Hi my name is Tracey Sharples and I am a Senior Early Years Officer at Glendevon ELC Centre (previously Maddiston PS Nursery). In addition to this I am privileged to currently work as a Marvellous Mealtimes Pedagogue one day a week with Ashley Cupples.

I have been in my current role for three years and during this time had the amazing opportunity to work alongside Alison Clark and Donna Green on a Froebel Trust project implementing a slow pedagogy approach within Marvellous Mealtimes in my setting. This project took me and our setting on a transformational journey to create unhurried mealtime spaces that reflected our Marvellous Mealtimes values and principles through the lens of a Slow pedagogy approach.

In August of this year our new Glendevon ELC Centre opened and with 104 children we are currently the second largest Centre in Falkirk Council. Although we had established effective Marvellous Mealtimes routines, we knew these would need to be adapted to suit our very larger, different centre environment.

It was extremely important to me and the team to ensure our Marvellous Mealtimes continued to be a high-quality calm, unhurried experience for all children regardless of if they were the first to eat or the last. Through ongoing reflective practice, input from staff, children, and families our Marvellous Mealtimes vision is coming together. A one-way system is utilised by children where they can independently access crockery/glasses, choose foods from the servery, and dispose of their food waste and dishes.

As an advocate of children’s agency, I am always looking at ways to further foster children’s autonomy and independence within our nursery. I identified an opportunity to do this as it was observed that a lot of children were not eating their full sandwich as they preferred plain bread, no butter or didn’t like the choice of filling leading to waste and hungry children.

To support this a “Do it Yourself Deli” was implemented which consisted of a small table located in the Marvellous Mealtime area. A sandwich visual was created to enhance the communication process for all children to create their own sandwiches and a variety of fillings provided to support this.

The “Do it Yourself Deli” proved to be very popular and children loved being able to just take their time to create their own sandwiches for themselves. Through observation it was identified that children who used the deli enjoyed the feeling of successfully making their own sandwiched and were seen to be more confident in their eating routines. Wastage was noted to have declined and pickier eaters were trying and eating more as they had made something they wanted to eat. The deli has also helped to instil early healthy eating habits for children within our nursery environment and developed many life skills such as decision making, perseverance, problem solving and responsibility to name just a few.

Our “Do it Yourself Deli” has continued to be very popular and further evolved through children having responsible for helping to prepare a variety of mixed salads, homemade dips and creating their own filled wraps. At first only a few children tried or ate the salads but over the last few months there has been an increase in the number children consistently eating a simple salad as an accompaniment to their meal. Offering choice and new foods at the deli table has created wonderful conversation opportunities which include discussing different tastes, healthy eating, and knowledge around a variety of fruit and vegetables. Feedback from children has been positive with many identifying that their self-prepared foods taste better than the adult’s ones.

Below are some photos of our “Do it Yourself Deli” and if you are thinking about setting one up and would like any help or advice, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Tracey