In the past year, I have encountered more politically passionate practitioners than I have in my entire career. Not just policy-makers and researchers, but practitioners working at grass-roots levels who are using social media and cluster forums to instigate change. I do not believe this is a negative development; to the contrary, the more experienced and knowledgeable practitioners’ voices we have, the more effective we shall be in shaping future policy and defending the rights and needs of children whom we are advocates for.
Category: News
Talk About, the project all Norfolk settings are talking about
The Talk About project provides early years speech, language and communication needs (SLCNs) support in Norfolk.
Coming Soon: Eggciting Education in the Pre-school
I’m currently working on a blog post about the recent experience my pre-school children had raising chicks. I’ll resist the urge to write “I’ll tweet about it!” and instead say that it should be published as soon as I can pull myself away from the delightful balls of feathers.
Give a child a typewriter and they will create worlds
I had a wonderful conversation with my grandparents a few months ago, about the types of things I liked to play with as a child. We chatted about paint, paper, notebooks and huge canvases (plentiful in a house full of artists and teachers) before moving on to things children find in the garden and the beliefs children have (fairies, mythical creatures, etc…); as a professional the conversation gave me the opportunity to consider whether the resources within my setting instigated the sort of quality play I wanted children to experience. One of the items I remember very vividly from my childhood was an old typewriter.Read More »
BOOK COMPETITION: Celebrating World Book Night 2013
To celebrate World Book Night UK 2013 (@worldbooknight) on the 23rd of April, I am running a competition for my Twitter and WordPress followers (based in the UK) to win some books!Read More »
Setting featured in Haylock & Cockburn’s new edition of “Understanding Mathematics for Young Children”
Last June, my setting was fortunate enough to play host to Derek Haylock (an education consultant and author; he worked for over 30 years in teacher education and was Co-Director of Primary Initial Teacher Training, responsible for the mathematics components of the primary programmes at the University of East Anglia in Norwich) whilst he collected observations for the new edition of the popular mathematical education book “Understanding Mathematics for Young Children”.Read More »
Newton Oakley Education 