The best place to be a child!

I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to work in our partner kindergarten in Norway over the Easter break, it was the perfect chance to spend time in the kindergarten without having to get cover for my own class while I was away. 4 of us in total took part in this job shadowing experience, 2 of us from N. Ireland and 2 from Croatia and as we all lived together for the 2 weeks it allowed for lots of discussions each afternoon and evening. 

I first visited Eikefjord Barnehage in 2006, then spent a week working there in 2008 and this transformed my practice. I revisit in January this year with my colleague and it was wonderful for her to see where I had got lots of my ideas from and why I had wanted to overhaul our class after spending time in this particular kindergarten.You can read about this previous visit in an earlier post on here. 

This time the plan was to spend time observing the outdoor class (5-6 year olds) and the 3-4 year olds, with each team spending at least 2 days with each group. The staff were just so welcoming and patient with our endless questions and the children just accepted these new grown ups who couldn't even speak Norwegian and made us part of their classes. 

The children all arrive into the kindergarten and go inside to their 'classroom', some arrive very early in the morning but the majority are all there by 9.15. Each class had approximately 14-15 children and 3 adults, 2 teachers and an assistant. At 9.15 both classes got dressed up for going outdoors, as I had previously discovered each class spends a lot of time outside not just the outdoor class. The kindergarten has a huge outdoor area, divided into different zones; a typical playground area with a slide, swings and sandpit, a steep bank and gravel area and a kitchen garden area. They also have use of lots of forest areas beside the kindergarten and above it. Some of the days the children got ready to go to a particular destination like the forest or woods, or out on the kindergarten boat (yes they have a boat!) whilst on other days they stayed in the playground but used the different areas throughout the day. They might have started out in the kitchen garden or swings etc. The outdoor class ate their lunch outside as much as possible and as they are the oldest children they didn't go inside for a rest time like the younger children did after lunch. 

In 2008 the thing that struck me the most was how calm the children were and they didn't have a lot of stuff to play with but I never heard any complaining of not knowing what to do etc. It was exactly the same 15 years later, these children are so well used to the space that they know exactly how to entertain themselves. Children are taught to make sure they can see an adult rather than the other way round and this gives them a lot more freedom to explore but equally puts the onus on them rather than on the adult. It was common to see groups of children heading off up the steep slope on their own and the adults were very relaxed and did not interfere with the play unless they felt they were needed to develop it or to help it progress. We tend to over teach in preschools and feel that unless we are in the middle of the play or leading an activity no learning is taking place. 

There were days that the staff had a particular aim and had groups of children with them to help e.g building planters, weeding or repairing structures but otherwise the children are left to play alone and develop their play as they want to without adult interference. By having 2 teachers in each class it also meant that 1 teacher could take a small group in to do more specific tasks e.g. precoding, whist the others were safely outdoors with the other teacher and assistant.

The atmosphere in the kindergarten is so relaxed and at least to all of us seemed very stress free. The children are definitely much more self sufficient than most of ours as they know each other so well having been together since they were very young (under 1 for most of them) and they know the environment too. The didn't keep coming up to an adult for reassurance like many of our children do, instead they wanted their peers approval. Staff are so skilled at observing that they don't need to be on top of the children either and what I noticed most of all was that no adult ever shouted for a child, they went to the child (unless the child was very far away from them). All staff are on the same page at all times and this consistency really helps the calm atmosphere too. If a child did hit another child or take something off them, the adult made a fuss of the 'wronged child' rather than admonishing the child who had been hitting or grabbing. When the upset child was soothed then they went to the other child to talk about what had happened, I really liked this approach and have been trying it in my class since I came back. (I say trying, as it does take a lot of patience!) 

Children are truly respected in this kindergarten and acknowledged as learners that will make mistakes, e.g they might not listen when asked to stay in one place, or to sit down when on the boat but they are allowed to be children and blind obedience is not expected nor are they punished for not doing as they were asked the first time. Our system too often will give a child one chance and if they don't comply they aren't given another chance but I liked how it was expected that a child would push boundaries as they are only children. 

I have come back from my latest visit to Eikefjord with lots of ideas of how I can be a better teacher and provide the best environment for my class. Being more patient is the biggest one for me! It also makes me very sad that our children only get 1 year of a play based preschool experience when I could see how much our 4-6 year olds could benefit from a more play based system. The emphasis in this kindergarten is on gross motor skills, independence and social & emotional skills, the academic skills will come later when they start school. 

Every staff member could say why they had this approach - they knew children need to have hands on learning experiences before you put pencils into their hands and ask them to sit at desks - they all knew of and referred to Froebel's Principles. 

It is one of the best places to be a child and they are truly living their best lives. 

Huge thanks to all the staff and pupils at Eikefjord Barnehage especially Dag & Katrine for letting us tag along in their classes and June Anne for sorting out the best accommodation ever!

Eikefjord revisited - Erasmus Plus.

The original wooden building has had a beautiful new build added to it. 

 *In December 2020 the U.K government withdrew from the EU funded Erasmus programme, despite assurances during and after the whole Brexit campaign and vote that this would not affect the U.K's participation. (After all many non EU countries already participate) It came as a complete shock to all involved and it proved to be yet another time when the Conservatives said one thing and then did another. The loss of this programme will have huge implications for staff, students and schools in the U.K and particularly those working with the youngest pupils as the new U.K Turing scheme does not allow for younger pupils to be involved as they would have to go abroad to visit schools and there are no staff development opportunities.*

The Full Steam Ahead team. 

Our school was very fortunate to be involved with Comenius and then Erasmus since 2004 and we had 3 projects running when Covid hit and were therefore able to add a further 12 months onto existing projects that should have finished in 2021 and 2022. It is through one of these KA2 projects 'Full Steam Ahead" that I was able to revisit Eikefjord Barnehage in January 2023. This project is all about outdoor learning and involves kindergartens and schools with kindergarten classes in Iceland, Belgium, Norway, Croatia and England. Each visit to a partner school allows the partners to bring an activity to do with some of the children in the host school and at the end of the project we will have a bank of ideas for fun outdoor STEAM activities. I was lucky to visit Iceland in December 2021 and Belgium in June 2022 and we hosted everyone in November 2022 at our school Our pupils in nursery and Foundation Stage (3-6 year olds) had a wonderful few days doing lots of fun activities with our different partner schools & they still talk about those few days months later. 

Inger & I first met in 2006.

Dag & I who first met in 2004. 

In January 2023 myself and Beverley who I work with every day in the nursery got to travel to Bergen and then onto Floro (the most western town in Norway) where we were based to spend 5 days with all our partners visiting Eikefjord Kindergarten or as it is known in Norwegian, a Barnehage.

This kindergarten was in a partnership with our school from 2004-2008 in our very first foray into European partnerships. During that project with preschools from Poland, Italy and Norway I learned so much and as it was very early in my teaching career it definitely shaped my practise. I first visited Norway in 2006 and then went back to spend a week doing a job shadow in the outdoor class at the kindergarten in 2008. You can read about that in this post:

http://nosuchthingasbadweather.blogspot.com/2011/01/stumbling-into-embracing-outdoor-play.html

This time I was excited for Beverley to see the kindergarten as, without her blind faith in me we couldn't have overhauled our setting after my visits there, I was really hoping when she was there herself she would see why I had wanted to start doing certain things back in our setting. It couldn't have been better as it had just snowed and we got to the see the kindergarten in a magical snowy state. 

Since my visit in 2008 the kindergarten has had a beautiful new building added on to the original old wooden building and it has been done so sympathetically & I was glad to see they didn't knock down the original building. The kindergarten now uses much more of the space around it and has incorporated a kitchen garden area - with a planting boxes, an outdoor kitchen, green houses etc. The whole outdoor area has a feeling of different destinations for children to interact within the wider outdoor space. As is typical in most settings I have visited across Scandinavia, they have a lovely peaceful staff room designated just for relaxation and separate work room so that there is no cross over while people eat their lunch or enjoy a cup of coffee. 

The relaxing staff room. 

Outdoor kitchen area. 

The work room. 

It was just a joy to be back in Eikefjord and I truly felt at home despite the language barrier. In my opinion it is one of the best places to work in and to be a young child attending. The whole place is so relaxed and chilled, nothing is hurried or rushed - in my opinion, it reflects all that I feel Froebel would have strived for in his original kindergarten. 

The activity day with the children - the best part of the project. 

What was also so special was that so many of the staff I met through the first project were still working there and it was wonderful to reconnect with them over the few days. The children were a delight to be around, confident and competent in their environment, climbing trees, sliding down steep banks, playing in shallow water in the forest and just very content and happy. In 2008 it was one of the things I noticed the most - how happy the children were playing outdoors with very little resources and not a lot of adults interference. Froebel saw autonomy as a key part of a young child and their experience in kindergarten and that is what I observed the most in 2008 and again in 2023 - children were confident to try things for themselves but the adults are skilled enough to know when to step in to assist or extend learning opportunities. 

At one point Beverley turned to me with the biggest smile on her face and said "I get it now" and I knew that she had seen exactly why I wanted to change so much when I came back in 2008 and I am so grateful that she trusted me enough to go along with it all. 

Beverley and I - without her trust in me I could never have overhauled our setting. 

I am returning over Easter with another colleague from home and 2 Croatian colleagues to work again in the kindergarten with the outdoor class and the 3-4 year olds and I can't wait to spend more time in this amazing kindergarten. My colleague is at the start of her teaching career and as I near the end of mine I can't wait to see what she brings back from our experience but I am also so angry that the U.K government has robbed younger staff and pupils of these wonderful experiences to grow and evolve practice through European partnerships. 

My Froebelian Journey Part 2

"Early Childhood is important in its own righting not merely a preparation for later learning. Learning begins at birth and continues throughout life" 

Tovey H. (2017) Bringing the Froebel Approach to your Early Years Practice p125

I am now 3 sessions in to my Froebel in childhood practice certificate and each online session just strengthens my desire to describe my own practice as Froebelian. It feels like I have come home and am among other practitioners who really get how early years education should be offered to our young children and their families. It is very interesting to see how Tina Bruce's Bedrock Principles are so interwoven with a Frobelian approach as it was these principles that resonated the most with me in 2003-2006 when I undertook further studies after my PGCE in Primary Education. I knew I wanted to teach nursery and that I would have to have robust knowledge of how young children learn to be able to be the best advocate for the type of play based curriculum I wanted to offer. My PGCE year was intense and was focused on primary teaching which seemed to be at odds with how I had seen young children learning in nursery when working as an assistant and later a substitute teacher. 

The biggest issue for me on teaching practice and then when subbing in primary was that stories were no longer read for pleasure. In nursery I had got used to reading or telling at least one story a day to the whole class, then in primary no story was read without there being questions afterwards or a dreaded worksheet to complete. It seemed like there had to be evidence of learning after every activity instead of trusting that the children were learning all the time.  So  I knew I needed further studies more based in early years so I could begin to articulate why I wanted to teach a certain way. I enrolled in a Masters in Early Education and it was whilst attending lectures that I was introduced to Bowlby and gained more insight into Vygotsky & Piaget. I heard about Montessori, Steiner and Froebel and began to read widely on practitioners who were influenced by these methods and approaches. One such person was Tina Bruce, I was just so struck by her Principles and I really enjoyed her style of writing. I loved the reading aspect of the Masters and probably spent more time reading in the library than writing my assignments. I devoured Margaret Edginton's The Nursery Teacher in Action and ordered anything written by Cathy Nutbrown. These were practitioners who had confidence in their approaches and were able to be advocates for the young children in their settings. 

I was terrible at research however, so decided to do an extra module and get a DASE (Diploma in Advanced Studies in Education) rather than do a dissertation to get a Masters. I really enjoyed the assignments and my then Principal was very helpful and read them for me to critique my writing style and to see if he, with no early years background could understand what I was writing about. This lead to us having an incredible relationship were we both learned from each other and he respected my early years knowledge and I was given a lot of freedom in the running of my class. I remember using Bruce's Principles as a way to explain why I would not be taking my nursery class to assembly or to eat in the dinner hall. I was able to articulate that the nursery year was not a preparation for school or P1 but that the young children in my class had a right to be 3 or 4 and had legitimate feelings and needs that should be met in the safe environment of the nursery classroom. These Principles particularly helped me argue for a more slowed down settling in period and of course this in turn does make it easier for the next teacher but it is not the main goal. 

I was very fortunate over the past 18 years to take part in the Comenius and then Erasmus programmes and was able to visit early years settings across Europe and host visits from European pedagogs in my classroom. The idea of kindergarten seems to be so natural and it always baffles me why in Northern Ireland, we only offer our youngest pupils one year of a preschool experience compared to the minimum 3-4 years their European peers are offered. 

Sometimes it felt like I was trying to cram 3-4 years of play experiences into 1 year and my day in nursery felt frantic as I tried to have it all. It felt very disjointed with lots of stopping play to transition to the next activity. I had the opportunity to listen to a webinar by the Froebel Trust and first heard the term 'wallowing in play' and it struck me as something I needed to work towards offering in my setting. If I am completely honest the recent Covid 19 pandemic was the turning point for me as a practioner, I was able to take part in many online trainings and webinars and I began to see how I could slow the routine down in my classroom to allow children time to actually get in to deeper play experiences. When visiting European kindergartens I was always struck by the gentle flow of the day, transitions were seamless and didn't always involve the whole class but more importantly staff and children had a lot more trust in each other - it was common for children to be out of sight and rarely did I see a whole group sitting looking an adult awaiting instruction. One big jarring aspect for me in my class was that we needed to clear the room to set up for dinner & this meant the children had to be in the story room for at least 30 minutes every day while the room was set up. I saw lovely dinner routines in the kindergartens I visited and really wanted to offer something similiar but we didn't have the space for a separate eating room or did we? Cue the pandemic and suddenly we closed the doors to families and children were dropped off and picked up from a gate or door and families were no longer coming into the setting & we had a big hallway sitting doing nothing. We took the decision to turn the hallway into a dedicated eating space and create a calm environment where half the class at a time could eat together whilst the other half remained at play. This has had the effect of slowing the whole routine down, children now have a choice, do they want to go for dinner now or in the second group? It allows for a relaxed ebb and flow in the play as the group dynamic changes from 27 to 13 or 14 children. 

Our current set up was inspired by Alison Clarke's research on 'Slow Pedagogy' (available here on the Froebel Trust website) and during the last 2 years I found myself drawing closer and closer to Froebel and those practitioners who are doing their best to reflect his approach in their settings. I love the term 'Slow Pedagogy' and am striving to ensure I try my best to offer such an approach in my classroom. As I continue on my journey I am constantly reminded of why I embarked on further studies over 16 years ago and why I need to keep on learning and connecting with other pedagogues who have similiar outlooks as myself. 

My Froebelian Journey

 "Play is the highest level of child development. It is the spontaneous expression of thought and feeling.....This is the meaning of the word 'play'..." 

Froebel (1826)in Lilley (1967), p.83-4

For those who are new to my blog or don't know my story, here is a short synopsis. 

I went back in 1999 to do my PGCE in Primary Education after years of resisting the pull of teaching. You can read more about that journey in this post: http://nosuchthingasbadweather.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-did-i-get-here.html

But suffice to say I become a teacher in 2000 and was determined to teach nursery or preschool rather than primary and so as soon as I had a job as a nursery teacher I began my Masters in Early Education so I could have a better understanding of how the young children I was going to be teaching operated and how I could best teach them. I ended up stopping at a DASE (this means I didn't do a dissertation) and this extra qualification certainly gave me the confidence to defend my practice and the rights of the young children I teach to an age appropriate curriculum. 

In the past 16 years I have read widely and attended many conferences in person and online and engaged with colleagues across the world to help me develop my knowledge and understanding of the youngest children in our education system. I have been fortunate to visit settings across Europe thanks to different funding programmes and engage in discussions with colleagues across the globe. These visits and interactions have had a huge influence on my practice. During all my time as a nursery teacher I felt myself drawn to one particular theorist - Friedrich Froebel, something about his ideas and approach just resonated with me. 

So here I am 16 years after I finished my DASE in Early Education, embarking on a new course through the University of Edinburgh  - A Froebel in Childhood Practice Certificate. This course can be done in person over 2 week in the summer but I am doing it online over 8 months.

You can find out more about this course here:

https://www.ed.ac.uk/education/professional-learning/intensive-courses/froebel

I am looking forward to delving deeper into all things Froebel and learning about other settings and practitioners who are already well on their Frobelian journey. I hope it will challenge me as a teacher and help me to introduce some new ideas to my classroom. After just one 3 hour session I already have lots of ideas about engaging families more widely and after the past two years it seems the perfect time to welcome families back into nursery and to strengthen the partnership between school and home. 

Even before Covid we spent a huge part of the nursery day outdoors but since 2020 have been based outside for the majority of the nursery day and it was great to learn from Dr Jane Reed that this is exactly how Froebel ran his kindergarten in Bad Blankenburg.

I will be using my blog as a journal to record and reflect on my journey as well as sharing some of the things I get up to with my nursery class. 

Let's Visit Numberland!

The Numberland Numbers from Haba. 

 In November 2020 I was fortunate to watch an episode of Early Years TV where Kathy Brodie interviewed Barbara Schindelhauer from Numberland. I just loved Barbara's enthusiasm for maths and the concept of Numberland really appealed to me as it encouraged deeper thinking about numbers and attributes of number than just by colour, shape or size. You can visit Barbara's website here: Numberland

It reminded me of a visit to a Swedish preschool where I saw young children using much deeper thinking about same and different than we would normally see in our settings, a child had brought 3 things that were different to show the teacher and one of the attributes was that the dinosaur was extinct and the other animals were still alive, it was far beyond the 'They all have 4 legs or are green ' that I expected. 

In Numberland each number has a house a garden, I loved that the houses had the amount of corresponding windows for each number and the gardens were shapes that could also have properties connected to that number e.g. a triangle for number 3, a pentagon for number 5 etc. I know as a preschool teacher that young children have no problem seeing anything as an animate object and I knew my class would love the wooden numbers with their faces and the fact that each number has a matching attribute to their numberness e.g. number 2 has 2 feathers on the hat, number 9 has 9 teeth. 

I made contact with Barbara straight afterwards and we began chatting through messenger and I ended up buying a set of the wooden numbers for my classroom. When they arrived I was so impressed by the quality and couldn't wait for the children to explore with them. Of course then we went back into lockdown and remote learning so the children didn't get to actually play with them until March. However I took them home with me so I could start to use them with the children during some live sessions. I was fortunate to have some little wooden houses that I could use for numbers as they had the right number of windows. During the live sessions I would hold up a house and the children would shout whose house it was & then they had to go get that same number of objects to show me. 

These wooden houses from Cosy were just perfect!

I had also downloaded the printable booklet from Numberland and it allowed me to make up laminated paper copies of the numbers, houses and gardens for the children to interact with more readily once we got back to nursery.

The printable Numberland resources. 

The wooden resources are made by Haba in Germany and anyone who has ever come across their products knows just how beautifully made and robust they are. Whilst a colleague was searching for a local supplier for the HABA fire pit she came across an Irish supplier called Jaggo Educational and I was delighted to discover they not only sold the fire pit but also all the Numberland resources, as it was becoming harder for them to be sourced from Germany thanks to Brexit. You can visit their website and specifically the Numberland resources here: Jaggo

The HABA fire pit that we use weekly in nursery. 

Once we got chatting to Jaggo about supplying schools in the North of Ireland a new partnership was formed & I ended up buying a fire pit for my garden too.

I also got the Numberland set of wooden houses, more numbers and number lane and blocks to try out with my class. 

I set the room up for a visit to Numberland and incorporated some of the Play to Learn More methods (read more about that here: Play to Learn More)

The children loved the concept of going to visit the numbers in their land and getting to see where they lived etc. After a few small group sessions I then allowed the children to just play freely with the numbers and their houses - 0-4. It was lovely to hear them chatting to each other and saying 'hey number 2 can I come visit you?' and 'Number 3 you would like this bike because it has 3 wheels' etc.

For after Easter I have set up 1-3 on a little table for the children to play with and during Numberland sessions in small groups we can explore more deeply who or what might visit each number because of their attibutes e.g. a cat could visit number 1 because she has 1 tail or number 4 because of her legs etc. 

I can't wait to see the children interact more and more with these beautiful resources and to learn more from Barbara. 

Seeing the positives of a pandemic!

We made it - my class survived the first term in nursery during a worldwide pandemic and man do I feel like I have dodged a huge moving juggernaut. I am fortunate to have lots of fellow educators around the world to connect with and share ideas, compare notes and tease out solutions to problems. I would have been lost without the friendship and support of these people the last few months as we navigated the unknown terrain of teaching with a deadly virus amidst us. 

I have tried my best to remain upbeat, I am an optimist after all but at times it was so hard to ignore the criticism being heaped on schools - we were lazy and hiding away during the initial lockdown and then we were being unrealistic when asking for lots of reassurances before reopening and now again we are being accused of being difficult and whinging because schools were asking for early closure so staff and families could relax and know they would not be self isolating over Christmas. We just can't win it seems. The same people who were calling for schools to open and 'get on with it' are now calling for them to close and it is so frustrating that we, the actual people in the thick of it are usually the last to know anything. 

But this is not a post where I moan and complain about how the powers that be seem to really dislike school staff, instead I am going to reflect on the all the good things that have emerged during the past few months in my setting.

Our lovely new dedicated dining area. 

A very wise friend, who used to be an inspector but is now an educational consultant, advised me to keep track of the benefits of any of the changes implemented because of Covid so I could justify why I was keeping them when we can go back to a normal school day. I loved this idea because I can see so many benefits to the changes we had to make and like my favourite tool, a risk benefit analysis, I can already see the benefits of the changes far outweigh any negatives. 

So what changes will we be keeping? 

We have always started our day outdoors and can't imagine doing this any other way after 13 years BUT we never start outdoors during the initial settling in period. There are too many indoor skills to be taught first so we usually don't start the outdoor session until the 4th or 5th day. The children have to learn where the toilets are, where to hang their coats up, store their change of clothes, put their artwork etc. and that is all indoors, normally after 3 days of repeating these tasks we feel we can now start outdoors but this year we settled everyone in from outdoors and it worked so we definitely won't be starting indoors again. In fact we didn't go indoors for the first week at all except to show a child where the toilet was. We settled the children in much slower and in smaller groups and I will argue to keep this too, we had 6-7 children for 2 hours over 4 days and it was so lovely to get to know them in the small group and to feel they were happy to  explore the playground in a small group. 

Coming down the path to head to Bear Woods and this is how the families leave the nursery each day too. 

Our restart document had allowed for parents in the playground at settling in time and we took full advantage of this with the small groups of 6-7 children, we did ask only one parent to attend if possible and they dotted themselves around the outdoor space over the 2 days of their child only attending 1 hour. We also had their taster day of 1 hour in August rather than June and we are definitely keeping this as it was much easier to meet the children on week and then have them come back the next week to actually start nursery. And this was the first year in a long time that most parents were away and children settled within the first week. We had 3 children who were more reluctant to say goodbye but even those parents were away within 30 minutes each morning. The biggest asset we have is that our entrance gate leads straight from the carpark into the playground and a few years ago we got holes cut into it to allow children to say goodbye through the gate and then watch parents drive or walk away. But guess what? We are in our building 14 years and they was the first time we ever thought to use the second gate we have at the other end of the playground! Home time has always been staggered over 15 minutes but as parents were having to stand 2 metres apart there was a real traffic jam at home time as one parent was leaving and another trying to come in the gate, so we started to look at how we could alleviate this without having parents come into the building. It was at his point we remembered we had 2 gates and so we now use one as an entrance and the other as an exit and everyone is easily accommodated in the 15 minutes. 

We also realised that this other 'exit' gate was a much better way for us to take the children out of the playground to go to Bear Woods as it avoids being near the carpark and we can let the children go ahead down the path at the side of the nursery on the way back and into the playground by themselves. I have no idea why it took us 14 years to realise this but there you go!

The fact that we have so much moveable furniture on wheels has also really come into itself this term, we simply moved the unit where children put artwork, hats, gloves, notes or water bottles into from the hallway into the classroom at the back door so they can gather everything on their way home. They can also now put their artwork straight into the drawers instead of having to walk across the classroom and out into the hallway - where some invariable got distracted by books or toys and an adult had to go look for them. We won't ever use the hallway as it was before so that unit can stay at the back door and we will also use this as the main entrance from now as it is under the covered area and allows parents to collect their children from the building whilst staying dry on wet days. 

You can read about how we have turned our hallway into a dining area in this post:http://nosuchthingasbadweather.blogspot.com/2020/10/can-we-fix-this-yes-we-can.html and suffice to say that will be staying as is no matter what. 

Another positive is that all the children could put their own coats on by the middle of October. Normally we start outdoors and then move indoors so it is rare that the children are taking coats off and on again everyday. But now with so much hand washing and coming indoors to eat snack and dinner, they are taking their coats on and off a lot this year. One of the main assistants had always tried to show the children how to use the Montessori Coat Flip to put their coats on but as it wasn't a regular activity it never really 'took' but this year it has been amazing. The children are so proud of themselves and enjoy putting their coats on and some are now moving onto zipping them up unaided too. 

Not having to clear the room for dinner has been the biggest change for us and one that we will fight to keep. This has had a huge impact on the routine of the day as normally we had to stop everything at some point in the morning to tidy up and then have story so the room could be set up for dinner. Now that we eat in a dedicated space that is set up already we can just play away uninterrupted and call half the class at a time for snack and dinner. Both myself and the main assistant visited a meeting in Finland last October and we both feel that we now have that same relaxed feel that we got in this kindergarten and that I have witnessed in settings in Iceland, Sweden and Norway. The nursery day flows even easier now we aren't stopping everything to hear the classroom for dinner. We are seeing a totally different ebb and flow to the play as well as the children have longer periods to enjoy playing together and in smaller groups as the day unfolds. It is lovely to have smaller groups playing for at least 30 minutes through the day as the other group is eating inside. We are also seeing that some children are getting that opportunity to warm up to play before deciding to put on their rain gear and go and play with water or in the mud kitchen whereas before they would have been told it was too late to do that as we were getting ready to go indoors or have dinner. Now if children are in their rain gear we simply take their coats off but keep the dungarees on over dinner and then they can go straight back into messy pay again afterwards. 

Having time to enjoy playing with friends outdoors over a longer period has huge benefits. 

We also decided to let them take their shoes/boots off in the dining area to recreate that more homely feel and they love this and it is definitely one to keep too. We now have a long tuff spot just for shoes in the dining area. 

Taking shoes/boots off to eat has proved very popular. 

Another nursery colleague said to me that she now felt we were back to how nursery was supposed to be before we all tried to recreate too many routines and do too much rather than simply letting the children play and I totally agree. I thought I had a relaxed, play based day until the term when I look back and realise how it was more like a hamster wheel of activities as we tried to cram too much in a 5 hour day. 

If we can we spend the day outdoors, only coming in to eat and for a story at the end of the day and so far it has fabulous. Obviously why the colder, wet days on the New Year we will probably move indoors around 11.30 so one group can have dinner and the other play in the classroom before swapping over. This means we have turned our day around and now spend the majority of time outdoors with a maximum of 40 minutes spend at indoor play, we will of course review this as the year progresses. 

So in conclusion, I won't miss all the cleaning and worrying about catching this virus but I will definitely be thankful that we had this opportunity to rediscover the joy of a truly play based curriculum and being based more outdoors than indoors. 

If we need to we can get the whole class seated for dinner together.