Where can Nursery teachers connect with other Nursery teachers, share ideas and find great resources? At the Nursery World show!
For a long, fantastic weekend in London Miss Tania and I were the lucky teachers who enriched their knowledge of Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) with best practices, masterclasses and educational resources.
We met great educators, such as Nancy Stewart or Dr Julie Brierley, who made it easy for all of us to understand and support schemas, such as ‘Trajectory’- children who are interested in straight lines. Yes, this is a schema and the children at this point learn about movement of things and self in vertical. Usually, children drop things from high places – chairs or cots, throw things, gaze at adults’ faces, climb up and over, jump off furniture, run up and down, make trails of glue or paint, knock over structures built by other children or play with running water in the bathroom.
What is the teacher’s job in this situation? Well, we could extend it by providing target throwing opportunities, build slopes and ramps to roll things down, to build towers and knock them down, provide opportunities to experience space and movement in /out, to move under and climb up; provide leaves and feathers to watch them falling down.
While sharing best practices in EYFS, we also had the pleasure to meet one of the most loved children’s novelist and poet, Mr Michael Rosen. Michael Rosen is loved equally by children and teachers. Children discover his stories and teachers can provide experiences and great interpretations with the help of his books. He is one of the few authors who understand that books have a primary function of meaning and feeling beyond phonetic values. Meeting Michael Rosen was a treat but hearing him read and act out his story ‘We are going on a Bear Hunt’ was just amazing!
We left the Nursery World Show excited, enthusiastic, eager to get back to our children and bearing educational resources – ‘toys’ as children call them.☺
