Since August 2022 I along with two other colleagues have taken on the role of Marvellous Mealtime Pedagogue. I will be supporting the Denny, Falkirk, Grangemouth and Larbert Clusters. I have a particular focus on supporting settings in developing a high-quality personalised approach to Marvellous Mealtimes, as aligned by the values and standards.

As many settings will be aware our Marvellous Mealtime consultants are visiting settings across the authority and by the end of term two, we visited a whopping forty-eight settings. If we have not already contacted your setting, we will be doing so in the coming weeks to visit you in either term three or four. I think I can speak on behalf of the Marvellous mealtime team when I say we have felt so privileged to be able to undertake this role as it has enabled us to witness how Marvellous Mealtimes has evolved over the last four years and that is testament to practitioners and individual settings hard work, dedication and commitment to embedding the approach.

Like many other settings Airth ELC have been on a transformational journey when developing and implementing their Marvellous Mealtimes approach.

You can read their care study below (you will need access to your Falkirk Glow Site)

Airth ELC Case Study

Children should be offered both cooking and baking experiences as part of core provision within ELC. Practitioners should be reflecting regularly on the balance of this in line with nutritional guidance.

According to the Scottish Public Health Observatory 15.5% of primary one children in Scotland were at risk of being obese. A greater percentage of boys (16.2 %) were found to be obese over girls (14.7%) (September 2022).

Snack and mealtimes are such a crucial part of a child’s day. I would like to take this opportunity to signpost you to guidance and documentation which are relevant to Mealtimes that I would urge you to explore further.

• • Eatwell Guide Eatwell guide 2016 FINAL MAR29 (publishing.service.gov.uk)

• • Food Matters food-matters-nurturing-happy-healthy-children.pdf (careinspectorate.com)

• • Froebel Cooking and Baking with young children Pamphlet Layout 1 (froebel.org.uk)

• • Good Practice Prevention and Management of Chocking guidance Good practice guidance prevention and management of choking episodes in babies and children.pdf (careinspectorate.com)

• • Health and Social Care Standards Health and Social Care Standards: My support, my life (www.gov.scot)

• • Keeping Children Safe; Supporting positive Mealtime experience in ELC. elc-practice-note-4-mealtimes.pdf (careinspectorate.com)

• • Setting the table – Nutritional Guidance Setting the table (healthscotland.com)

Some reflective Questions?

• • Are you familiar with the Eatwell Guide?
  • Do you provide a balance across the five food groups?
  • Do you place the same importance on cooking as you do baking in your ELC?
  • What nutritional considerations do you take into account when celebrating a child’s birthday?

Finally, I would like to extend a MASSIVE thank you to all Support for Learning Assistants, Early Years Practitioners and Early Learning and childcare Assistants who attended our most recent CLPL in the month of November between both sessions we had around 230 practitioners. To have this many people attending shows how much Marvellous Mealtimes is truly valued in our authority and beyond.

As always please just get in touch if you have any questions at ashley.cupples@falkirk.gov.uk.

Remember to access the marvellous mealtimes section on  Falkirk Early Learning – Home

 

 

 

From the Beginning…….

 

Hi my name is Nicola McCarter-Gall and I am an Early Intervention pedagogue and part of the Early Intervention Team here in Falkirk Council. I officially started this role in August 2022 and work within a small team that consists of another Early Intervention Pedagogue, an Educational Psychologist, a Training and Improvement officer and the ASN Outreach Service.  My role as an Early intervention Pedagogue helps ensure children and families receive the necessary support to enable all Falkirk children to get the best possible start in life.

The Early Intervention Pedagogue Role I hold:

• Provides support and guidance to ELC teams as to how best to meet the needs of children in the setting.
• Whilst support is generally focused on children with known or suspected additional needs, advice will be relevant to all staff and support high quality core provision.
• Work in allocated clusters across Falkirk
• Develop and deliver CLPL sessions relevant to needs analysis.

Levels of support – Early Intervention Pedagogue

Settings can make a self-referral in through phone call or email directly to their link Early intervention Pedagogue. Some of the ways I have been helping settings has been role modelling, question and answer sessions, delivering CLPL, having professional dialogue and developing strategies with practitioners.

As Early Intervention Pedagogues we support 39 ELC classes, 14 ELCC Centres, 14 Private Partner Nurseries and Childminders across Falkirk Council.  We have supported 46.2% of our settings since August 2022.

 

This bar graph breaks down the number of settings that have received support from an Early Intervention Pedagogue since August 2022

 

 

 

My role also involves the delivery of SVQ approved units which are based around children and families with additional support needs. The undertaking of these units should build confidence and knowledge within practitioners around working with children and families with ASN. The link to these units can be found below and if you are interested, please get in touch with me @ Nicola.mccarter@falkirk.gov.uk

Unit 339: Promote the Care, Learning and Development of children with Additional Support Needs in Early Education Settings

Unit 321: Promote the Care, Learning and Development of Children with Additional Requirements in Partnerships with Their Families

 

Useful links and resources

                                                                                                

 

FC Staged Intervention QR                                           Early Intervention QR                                                   FC GIRFEC QR

 

Autism Toolbox

 

Hi my name is Elaine Haughton and I am an Early Years Pedagogue with a particular focus on children’s rights and participation.

This year I have been given the opportunity to further develop and embed Falkirk ELC’s ‘What Matters to Me’ approach.

As part of a universal approach, I am providing all ELC settings across our authority with the opportunity for a support visit where we can engage in discussion around personal planning, what matters to children and families and how to embed children’s rights into everyday experiences.

Initially What Matters to Me was something that was only really considered during times of transition. For What Matters to Me to be valued as a rights-based approach it has to be a document that is shared between staff, children, and families throughout a child’s time at nursery. It should capture and respond to children’s perceptions, showing children and families that we have listened.

Child participation is one of the core principles of the UN Convention of the rights of the child. It is important for teams to reflect on how they encourage and provide opportunities for children to participate in the everyday life of the setting. Are we embedding children’s rights in our everyday practice in a holistic and meaningful way?

“Rights are not an add on, they are woven through every aspect of the ethos and provision of the service. Staff interactions with children are loving and caring and support children to understand their rights, not as an activity to be planned but as an everyday experience.”                    Doreen Watson (Care Inspectorate)

As practitioners we need to explore why we seek children’s voices and what we do with the things they’ve shared. How do we ensure we are not being tokenistic? Do we take the time for quality and meaningful conversations? It’s about slowing down and listening with our eyes and ears, observing how children express their thoughts and ideas both verbal and non-verbal.

For children that are non-verbal how do we enable them to participate? By providing children with a range of tools and methods for sharing with us what’s important to them, what matters to them, we can capture and respond to children’s perceptions.

Adapted illustration Listening to young children, Third edition. 2017. Alison Clark.

Wherever you are on your journey to ensuring a rights-based approach to ‘What Matters to Me’ it is important that you reflect back on the Image of the child.

• • What thoughts do you hold, on children and childhood?
  • How do you talk to, listen to, and observe children?
  • Does your environment positively reflect the image of the child? An effective children’s rights-based approach should be embedded in a setting’s vision, values and aims, ethos, routines, and when implementing change.

It should not be ‘another thing to do’ but already underpin the setting’s pedagogy and be part of everyday practice.

Contact details for any further support – elaine.haughton@falkirk.gov.uk

I am Lisa Boa and I am an Early Intervention Pedagogue with an added focus on family learning.

We have been waiting so long to open our doors of the nursery and welcome our parents in and now we can 😊 I don’t know about you, but I had so many questions going around in my head at the start of term and I thought I might share these with you:

• • • What does opening our doors mean to educators, families, and children?
    • What should it look like, feel like and sound like?
    • How do we ensure all our families are included?
    • What strategies do we use to engage our families?
    • Do we know what our family’s needs are?

I am sure you will have more to add to my list. As part of my early intervention role, I am the champion for family learning and this can cover anything from daily informal conversations to Peep learning together programmes.

So why do we want to involve our families in the life of the nursery? There is lots of research about the benefits of involving and engaging families in their child’s learning. We know that working together with families can have long lasting effects on family relationships, family wellbeing and academic achievements.

‘It’s well proven that children do better when parents and schools work together. However, not all parents find it easy to be involved in their child’s learning. We want to help parents lay strong foundations for the loving, nurturing relationships that we know are integral to children’s emotional, physical, socio-economic and educational wellbeing’. (National Parenting Strategy 2012)

To help us do this we can think about what supports good parent involvement:

• • Relationships – We need to attune to our children and families, be responsive to their needs and emotionally available to them.
  • Communication – We want to provide clear, consistent, and continuous communication. We want to sensitively support any communication breakdowns and work together.
  • Flexibility/adaptability –We want to break down as many barriers as possible for families. That might mean thinking outside the box, offering different times and thinking creatively about solutions.
  • Strength based approach – Families are all unique, they come with their own strengths and resources and we want to empower out families through these. They know their child the best.

Sometimes we want to think about targeted approaches to our family learning experiences. Robust self-evaluation and a good contextual analysis will help support us to identify family’s needs and how we can support families to engage with us. Education Scotland has some great resources to support this.

Engaging parents and families – A toolkit for practitioners | Learning resources | National Improvement Hub (education.gov.scot)

Family Learning wakelet – Wakelet

 

One size does fit all, but it is maybe worth having some professional dialogue in your teams about how you support your families. Other resources you might find useful are:

• • Scottish government have a ‘supporting parents to further engage in their children’s development’ ELC module that you may find useful. Early learning and childcare practitioners: training modules – gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
  • The Early learning and Childcare Wakelet has lots of useful links e.g. Dug, parentzone, parents club, loose parts play, etc that you could share adapt and support families with. Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) Wakelet. – Wakelet
  • HGIOELC 2.5 & 2.7
  • A quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection 2.2 & 6.3

Thank you for taking time to read this blog.

Please feel free to contact me @lisa.boa@falkirk.gov.uk if you have any queries I can help you with.

A very warm welcome back to the new term in 2023!  We hope you all had an amazing Christmas break and a peaceful start to the ‘New Year’.

We thought it would be nice to start off 2023 with some insight around the work of our pedagogues that make up our EYs focus group.  I am sure by this time you will have had a visit from at least a one of them over terms 1 and 2.  We have had a lot of feedback on the value of the focus work that the individuals within the group are offering and thought it would be good to get them to share their journey on the work that they do and the different ways that they can support you.

The purpose of these visits is simply to reach out to settings and highlight the targeted support that is available/offered by individual members of the central team.    Each day this week one of our pedagogues from the focus group will share their work and talk a little about what that looks like and what support they can offer you.  Please take this opportunity to ask our staff any questions you may have around their focus area.

The focus areas that are on offer at present are:

• Children’s rights and participation – Elaine Haughton
• Family Learning (ASN)– Lisa Boa
• ASN – Nicola McCarter Gall
• Marvellous Meals – Ashley Cupples

From January 2023 we will also have a member of the team offering support / advice on legislation around Care & Support.  Margaret Aitken will also be out and about offering support and advice on safeguarding/risk assessments, infection/prevention, medication, accidents/incidents and ‘Cooksafe’.  Watch out for Margaret’s blog in the coming days.

 

Many of you will also be aware of out ‘Hub’ at Woodlands ELC and the amazing networking opportunities that are available there.

We have one of our Pedagogues (Helena McPhail) from the central team also working there to help support this fantastic initiative.  Another great blog to be looking out for!

We would love to hear your feedback on the range of support that we offer and more importantly how we can support you as an individual setting or cluster.  Please remember reaching out for support or advice is a positive.  We are all on a journey and we all learn from each other.

Learning is a journey and not a destination!

In February we will be sending out a Microsoft forms questionnaire to gather your feedback on the support and CLPL offered from all of the central team.  Your feedback on this will help influence the support and CLPL offered in the new academic year 2023/24.

We really look forward to hearing from you and wish you all an amazing year ahead!

I’m Lysa Thomson and have just started in the new role of Visiting Teacher: Play Pedagogy within the Early Years Team. I’m excited to embark on this new post and work alongside colleagues to continue to embed our play pedagogy in Falkirk.

Before joining the team, I worked for ten years as a Class Teacher from Nursery to Primary Seven and most recently for four years as Principal Teacher with remit for ELC/P1-3. I love the variation, excitement and collaboration that working in education brings. My passion lies in Early Years and ensuring that children come and leave school each day full of enthusiasm for play and learning. Within the last four years I have taught in Primary One and led and developed Play within Primary One and Two. During these years and now, I continue to eat, sleep and breathe the transformational change to an appropriate play pedagogy. I have a clear understanding of why this pedagogical approach should be commonplace and how it can be achieved using the tools, knowledge and support of our colleagues in Falkirk and beyond. Within my new role I have a focus on learning, teaching and assessment, delivering CLPL, building networks for Teachers and Practitioners, sharing Falkirk Council’s vision with Parents and Carers and representing Falkirk within the Early Years FVWLRIC Team.  I’m looking forward to working with colleagues in our schools to continue to drive Play is the Way to ensure our children in Falkirk have the best start to life at school.

 

 

 

 

How can I help?  

• Work with you or your team to create the vision for your school’s Play Pedagogy, evaluate where you are and what your next steps are in driving Play is the Way forward in your school.
• Support staff in meeting the aims of the School Improvement Plan or Practitioner Enquiry in relation to developing a play pedagogy in Primary One.
• Work collaboratively with staff to develop their understanding of high quality play pedagogy and what this looks like in day-to-day practice.
• Signpost staff to the suite of resources and guidance available.
• Facilitate discussion to overcome challenges you are currently facing in implementing Play is the Way in your class or school.

If you feel this would be beneficial to yourself or your team, please complete the Request Form for P1 Pedagogy which can be found at:

Falkirk Early Learning – Play is the Way – the full story – All Documents (sharepoint.com)

I look forward to working with you in the future.

Lysa

I am going to begin by ‘pondering’ over the privilege of having a lead Froebelian role within Froebel in Falkirk. However, for me I am led by the children through the concept of ‘freedom with guidance’ with a strong shared vision where I am guided by my values which are underpinned and lived through Froebelian Principles. It is also extremely important to share I am one of many leaders within our Falkirk Froebel Family and early years community as we are all leaders in our own right where there is equal autonomy and relationships do truly matter. Central to our Froebelian approach is to collaborate, as we live and learn together from one another which includes our youngest wee people, practitioner’s, families, communities embracing a diverse, equitable culture, that respects the environment we live in and with.

 

Falkirk Froebel Family

Currently we have 155 Falkirk Froebel Family Froebelians

We have 34 Falkirk Early learning and childcare and school settings with trained Froebelian’s who have  completed the University of Edinburgh Froebel and Childhood Practice Course.

Currently there are a further 45 funded places for 2022-23 and Falkirk applications have been submitted.

Each Falkirk Froebelian creates a wonderful Froebel project within our Falkirk settings and communities:

 

There have been many highlights throughout the year but here are a few:

In November 2021 I Graduated with a MSc in Early Childhood Practice and Froebel where I focused my dissertation on ‘Exploring Slow Pedagogy through the Froebelian Lens’.

 

 

Froebel and Slow Pedagogy

Following on from my dissertation this year, I have been leading a Froebel Trust funded project on Implementing Slow Pedagogy in ELC through Froebelian Principled Practice. This has involved working with three of our fantastic Falkirk ELC communities: Bantaskin ELC, Larbert ELCC and Glendevon ELCC along with having the pleasure to learn from and with Professor Alison Clark whose Froebel Trust  research ‘Slow knowledge and the unhurried child” was drawn on to support thinking. This has been an amazing way to collectively collaborate and learn together across our communities. I would invite you to consider learning more about slow pedagogy and what this looks like in your community. I have given a snapshot of some of our project below, please view using the QR code.

 

Senior Early Years Officer – Equity Coach

In addition, having the pleasure of supporting SEYO’s through an Equity Coach remit has been a wonderful journey. One of the many positive benefits is the impact and joy ‘Song of the Moment’ is having within the Easter Carmuirs early years community. Where this has very much been a process of starting with the child which embraces the many benefits singing can bring through play and real-life experiences for every child. This has drawn on much of the collaboration of Family Songs and Froebel’s Mother Songs pedagogy/philosophy.

 

Family Songs: Learning together through music

This year relaunched Family songs at home to promote a learning together resource to use at home, in early learning and childcare and throughout our communities. A collaboration created by Falkirk Froebelians, Fab Falkirk Folk, Speech and language therapy, YMI to share and use across our communities.

Click the link for an example of our latest Family Songs sway and we welcome everyone to use this resource: https://sway.office.com/MqgXvYcyNF8hMOwx?ref=Link

 

Froebelian Futures

This year Falkirk were invited to be part of the fabulous Froebelian Futures project, which is in partnership with The University of Edinburgh, Cowgate Under 5’s centre and funded through the Froebel Trust. It aims to provide ongoing Froebelian training as a progression pathway following the Froebel in Childhood Practice course where I have responsibility as the local authority lead with this course:

 

 

So far in 2021-22; 5 x Falkirk settings and 10 x Falkirk Froebelian practitioners and leads have completed or on route to finishing this Practitioners Inquiry course, which has been going on throughout the year. It has given the practitioners and leads the skills and confidence to carry out action research within their establishments and they have produced some wonderful research on “Froebel for Families”,” A Froebelian Approach to Observation”, “Embedding Froebelian Principles in a Progressive Play Pedagogy”, “Are We Seeing the Super in Superhero Play?” and “Making Children’s Participation and Perceptions Matter”. Please click the link to the Froebelian Futures website to find out more: https://www.froebel.ed.ac.uk

If you would like to follow Froebelian Futures on Twitter their handle is @froebelfutures

Current applications are in the process for Falkirk Froebelian’s carrying out this course in 2022-23

 

Froebel Gathering

Delighted to be invited by Professor Tina Bruce to share Falkirk Froebel Family Network Journey at the London Froebel Gathering. Lots of wonderful feedback and fabulous connections made.

 

 

Please scan the QR codes to see some examples of Froebelian Practice across Falkirk

 

By Donna Green

 

This week our Blog follows on from High Quality Literacy Gatherings by Frances McMahon and looks at how we can explore maths and numeracy through quality gatherings.

Across Falkirk Council there are many fantastic examples of early maths and numeracy experiences taking place daily through high quality spaces, interactions, and experiences. Adult-led gatherings happen both organically as we respond to our learners as well as through intentional planning. Carefully planned adult-led experiences which are playful are important as part of a balanced approach to play pedagogy. Adult-led experiences in maths and numeracy allow children to develop their thinking and extend their skills and knowledge. More information o adult-led gatherings can be found here The importance of high quality gatherings – Falkirk Early Learning (glowscotland.org.uk)

Below are some ideas for adult led gatherings to develop children’s core maths and numeracy skills.

Supporting Matching, Sorting and Classifying

Scavenger Hunt – provide an exciting container for children to go off and collect interesting items from their environment then talk about their collections with others.

Investigative provocations – Create an investigation area for sorting. Provide a different collection every week. Considering things that stretch, roll, make noise, have holes.

Kim’s game – Children guess the item that’s missing to develop their matching skills

Supporting Shape

Make patterns of sounds – using musical instruments or claps beginning with 2 sounds and encourage children to copy.

In dance and movement activities, create repeated patterns for children to copy.  Provide visual aids to allow children to create their own repeated patterns of movements.

Silhouette symmetry – Use a torch to reflect outlines of symmetrical objects on to a wall. Encourage children to  guess what it could be or pin paper on the wall for them to mark out the shape.

Chalking and Walking – Draw or tape 2D shapes using large chalks. Encourage the children to walk, stride, hop or skip round the shape while commenting on the attributes of the shape e.g. that triangle has 3 corners, the rectangle has 2 long sides and 2 short sides.

Weaving, sewing and printing experiences using 2D and 3D materials.

Supporting Measure

Measure all around us – Children can select items in their environment to measure. E.g. How many steps does it take to get from one place to another?

Baking by Measure – We know that cooking, in particular, baking are great experiences to support early measures. Using scales, jugs, spoons etc.

Supporting Position and Movement

Instructional games provide children with the opportunity to understand position and movement e.g. 2 steps forwards, 3 steps sideward.

Chalk, paint or tape down roads, tracks or shapes for children to move around with their bodies, bikes, prams or small world toys such as cars.

Action games and rhymes provide children with the opportunity to refine moment skills where children can demonstrate for each other.

Developing knowledge of movement and position through fine motor play e.g. playdough, threading, bead pictures, small world play etc.

Experiences taken from Falkirk Council Natural Numeracy Self-Led CLPL

Maths Through Stories, Songs and Rhymes

Stories are an invaluable resource for extending children’s learning in maths and numeracy. There are many stories with explicit themes and there are others which allow children to develop their understanding through the context of the story. A story time gathering may also lead into other gatherings as children share experiences of the characters in real life. Eg – creating maps to go a treasure hunt or baking a cake like the character in the story. For more information on maths through stories check out MathsThroughStories.org – HOME and Books that support numeracy – Scottish Book Trust.

Songs and rhymes help children develop important numeracy skills through rhythm, beat, sequence and repetition. Songs and rhymes which encourage number and counting should be a staple part of young learners’ time in Early Years. Action songs, dancing and yoga also encourages the development of numeracy and mathematical skills.

This is not an exhaustive list of ideas to develop early maths and numeracy skills within ELC’S, please feel free to leave a comment of any other adult led literacy activities that have worked well in your setting or tweet about them.

For more information on how to develop core numeracy skills please refer to the Natural Numeracy CLPL which can be found on Falkirk Early Learning – CLPL and Local Information (sharepoint.com)

My name is Adele McIntosh, I am an Early Years Officer at Denny PS ELC and I have worked here for almost three years. At Denny I have been fortunate enough to be able to take my passion for art forward as one of my leadership projects.

I have a keen interest and passion for art. During my spare time I like to paint, although I feel it is important to share that I am not the best artist myself. I also enjoy visiting art galleries when on holiday.

In early 2020 I introduced “Artist of the Moment”. Artist of the Moment is a provocation and invitation to learn more about art as well as specific artists and their work. By exposing children to these opportunities I believe they have developed their curiosity, creativity and enquiry skills, and I am hopeful they will begin to develop a love of art, just like myself.  Artist of the Moment has been successful here at Denny which proves you do not have to be a great artist yourself to embrace this.

I first introduced Artist of the Moment in early 2020 in the months before we went into lockdown. We explored Steven Brown, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Picasso. The children responded extremely well to these artists and demonstrated high levels of engagement. When we went into lockdown it did not stop us; as while sending out ideas to parents over the next two months we sent out artists and images that the children could engage with from home.

2021 has been very exciting as this academic year we have been back to “almost normal” and this has given us a great opportunity to fully embed Artist of the Moment into our practice as a whole ELC team. I recently used quality improvement methodology to embed this further into our practice. The PDSA model has enabled myself and my colleagues to remain consistent in this approach. Due to the success of Artist of the Moment, we have now adopted this approach. After writing this blog I am hoping I can help other educators to scale and spread this in their own settings.

I have made a plan for the year of the different artists we will explore however, I am always responsive and flexible depending on children’s changing interests.  For example our children showed an interest in sewing activities which led me to adapt my plan and provide the provocation of a fashion designer. While creating my plans I take into account important events written in our long term planner such as Guy Fawkes and Burns celebrations. I also consider the seasons and months of the year that fit in better with a specific artist’s style of work and artists who use interesting methods to keep providing new, fun and engaging experiences.

I have worked hard to make Artist of the Moment visible in our environment. In the creative area I display a selection of images of our Artist of the Moments work as well as a picture of the artist with some information about them such as; their name, where they live and the style of art we are looking at. One set of images are hung up above the creative table as a permanent fixture for the month and another set is able to be used on the table or the floor so children can look at them more closely. Fortunately my colleagues are very supportive and when they are in the creative area they facilitate discussions and take the learning deeper if children show a keen interest in this.

In October 2021, we embarked again on our Artist of the Moment journey by exploring the work of Steven Brown. The children were drawn to these pictures due to the colours and created their own versions. This naturally led to a lot of investigation into colour mixing. In November 2021, we explored the work of Jackson Pollock and linked this into the festival of Guy Fawkes, where we were exploring bonfires and fireworks. The children used marbling techniques to create beautiful Jackson Pollock inspired paintings. In January 2022, we learned about Andy Scott the Scottish artist who made the Kelpies and other wonderful sculptures around Scotland. While learning about his style of art we introduced junk modelling to the children where they designed and created their own masterpieces. In February 2022, we looked at the fashion design creations of Vivienne Westwood. Children had the opportunity to repurpose old clothes and materials to create their own designs. They cut, glued, painted and sewed the materials and I must say they looked fantastic. They also then showed off their work on the catwalk. In March 2022, we investigated Yayoi Kusama’s polka dot sculptures. During this month we introduced the medium of clay to the children which has been extremely popular with children asking for it on the days it has not yet been available. As a result of this we are going to be looking at embedding this as part of our core provision when we move to our new ELC. Children have enjoyed exploring the texture of clay and have been experimenting with adding water. The children’s confidence has grown and some of the sculptures have been amazing! Once dry children have completed the process by painting them and taking them home to their families. The feedback from families has been very positive.

In the coming months I plan to provide opportunities for children to explore Pointillism by Georges Seurat and Portraits by looking at Calum Stevenson a local artist who recently won Portrait Artist of the Year. There are also many more artists and techniques that I look forward to introducing to the children in the next academic year.

If you think this sounds interesting and feel you would like to implement Artist of the Moment in your own setting then I would be more than happy to offer support and share my resources to help get you started.  You can contact me on my glow email address:  gw13rentonadele@glow.sch.uk

It is definitely easier to implement than you may think and the children have significantly benefitted from the experience, it supports planning for the creative area and links to all Experiences and Outcomes linked to Art in the Curriculum. I have also started a dedicated twitter page @ArtistMomentELC to keep you up to date with our journey at Denny and so you can share your journey with us too.

Please have a look at the video link to see many more images and videos of our Artist of the Moment journey over the past 6 months: https://youtu.be/Yx2X1uVWtxM

 

 

Hi, I’m Louise Harrison, one of Falkirk Council’s team of Pedagogues, and I’m currently based with the fantastic team of practitioners in Bowhouse ELC.  I joined the team just a couple of months before the C word was on everyone’s lips……..COVID of course!  I think it’s probably fair to say that we’re all more than a little tired of COVID and are glad to see things eventually returning to some sort of normality.  However, we cannot underestimate the impact that the pandemic, lockdown in particular, has had on our wee people.

In fact, some of our very youngest learners are coming to us having spent a significant portion of their lives in lockdown, massively limiting their experiences of the world around them compared to those born just a few years before and shrinking their social circle to that of immediate family.  Add to this the wearing of face coverings, which make it difficult for children to differentiate between sounds such as ‘p’ and ‘t’ and virtually impossible to read facial expressions, and it is unsurprising that we are seeing an increase in difficulties with language development and social communication.  And all this during the most critical developmental period for our wee people!

With all this in mind and with early language and social communication development as a priority on Bowhouse ELC’s Improvement Plan, we decided that part of our work this year would be to consider how pretend play can support children with this.

Why pretend play?

Whether domestic role playing in the home corner, zooming around as their favourite superhero, or using small world characters to create a scenario from their imagination, engaging in pretend play provides children with limitless opportunities for talk and interaction.

An environmental audit of current role play provision was carried out on 28^th October which was then shared with the team.

Then………we began to plan!

• What resources would we need, and how many?
• Where could we get them from?
• Where should we set it up?
• How much space should it be given?
• What would our pedagogy around it look like? (eg. is fighting/weapon play acceptable?, can resources be transported?)

We identified that whilst it’s important for children to have access to pretend play opportunities throughout the setting (both indoors and out), it’s helpful to have space identified as the ‘role play’ area, where they know they can find dress up resources and props to support their play.  However, this is obviously space dependant and is by no means essential.  Let’s face it, children can and should engage in pretend play whenever and wherever the fancy takes them.

For the purpose of collecting data to measure the impact of the project, in consultation with key workers, 5 children were identified as our focus group.  Baseline data was gathered for each of them using the Forth Valley Speech and Language pyramid, assessing where each child is currently functioning for each of the key components of language and communication.

When we began to think about how we would develop our pretend play provision, we did some research and had professional dialogue around the developmental stages of pretend play.  We recognised that some of our children needed little more than their own imagination to create the play, some found this easier with the use of open-ended resources to prompt their creativity (boxes, material, pegs) and others would initially need some real objects to support them in developing imaginary play (household items, dolls, clothes).  Taking all this into consideration we created our list of core resources, ensuring there was enough variety to support the developmental stages of all our wee people.

The dress up clothes were really instrumental in sparking the initial interest in pretend play, and led to the creation of lots of characters and rich descriptive language.  This was then developed to include material, pegs, white t shirts and fabric pens to further enhance the creativity and imagination.  Whilst pretend play offers a whole host of benefits for wee people, it’s been important to keep focussed on our aim of improving language development and social communication.  This requires adults to be available and to be involved in the play (when appropriate) in order to provide new vocabulary and extend the play.

In order to provide a link with families, play boxes were created containing a variety of resources to initiate and support pretend play, again including both open ended and everyday objects.  A short video was made demonstrating how they might be used and added to the boxes using a QR code, along with some information about how this type of play can support the development of  language and social communication.

 

If you’d like further information, get in touch with me at louise.harrison@falkirk.gov.uk 

 

By Louise Harrison