1. Dawn Hendry, Head Teacher of Balgay Hill Nursery School, Dundee
We are trialling the greater involvement of children in all aspects of nursery life. They are helping to carry out audits of practice e.g. sustainability planning, recording their own health and safety checks, ordering snack foods on-line and giving the Head Teacher their opinions about what she does well and what she can improve to feed in to her professional work review. There is only one slight warning to go along with this - if you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question!
2. Vanessa Callan, director of High House Nursery, Stansted
We have created a parent occupation box on the registration form with an additional question, “would you be happy to come in and share your skill and/or knowledge with the children?” This has led to a visit from a policeman in his shiny new riot van as well as doctors, dentists, dieticians, fire officers and chefs. [See also the article on EYPP where the form was amended so that NI number, needed to claim EYPP, is a requirement of registration]
3. Samantha Attwater, Director of Nurseries for Aurora Academies Trust, Sussex
Put bicarbonate of soda in vinegar, or mentos in coke, to create an erupting volcano. Our children really enjoyed creating a paper mache volcano first and the experiment brought it to life.
4. Sara Williams, manager, Y Pelican, Cardiff
We are a Welsh eco nursery and find the best way to be sustainable is to keep everything. To come up with new ideas, put piles of recyclables on the table in a staff meeting and give them 10 minutes to make something. Ours covered a box in yoghurt pots and made a spaceship. You’ll need a big cupboard, though.
5. Rachel Cowie, EYP and Montessori teacher, in the process of setting up her own nursery, London
We’re going on a bear hunt! Using a piece of fabric and I sewed and glued grass, blue material for water, black mud-coated fabric for mud, corn flour, brown paint, twigs and acorns for the forest and ice cubes and cotton wool for snow. Children walked along it making the sound effects to the story and identifying each section, and I used open-ended questions to promote their language development e.g. ‘What does it feel like being in a snowstorm?’ I then encouraged parents to make their own resources to use with their children at home.
6. Mick Davies, programme manager, Surestart Palfrey, Walsall
Here’s a little gardening tip. These can be grown indoors. Take 2 daffodil bulbs, 1 fresh beetroot, 1tbs oil.
- Scoop out beetroot and place one bulb inside. Add the oil to beetroot flesh that was scooped out and pack it around your daffodil bulb. Plant as normal
- Plant your other daffodil as normal.
- When they bloom you’ll have one yellow and one pink-tinted flower.
7. Suzanne Charlesworth, Nursery Manager, Each Peach Childcare, Hove
We are inviting the parents of children who start school in September 2016 to create their own ‘All About Me’ box, to promote key aspects in the EYFS. The children can put anything in the box they like - a photo of their family, a favourite toy - anything that means something to them that they can talk about with their peers. This will help to build their confidence and communication skills and give them the opportunity to express their personal, social and emotional skills.
8. Jill McWilliams manager, Kids@BT9 Belfast
All our parents complete a ‘settling in review.’ This enables the parent the opportunity to give feedback (positive or negative) on the settling for both the baby/child and the parents. This feedback informs self-reflection and any improvements which need to be made. The same process is completed when a child transitions from room to room.
9. Joelle Lax, Manager at Holcroft, LEYF, London
We run ‘Lunch with your key person’ events termly. The key person invites all their families to join in for a special key group lunch. Parents meet each other, share tips about food and enjoy seeing their children explore their nursery environment. Parents are amazed to see how children are more adventurous to try new foods with their peers. The children also make the invitations. We find this helps with building secure attachments/positive relationships and has really helped ‘fussy eaters’ and children who are finding settling in difficult.
10. Sarah Mackenzie, Quality and Training Director, Childbase Partnership, nationwide
We use the Education Endowment Toolkit, which takes key topics such as literacy and weighs up the strength of current evidence, impact on learning, and cost, to ensure that spending is concentrated on areas which will have the greatest impact.
This has been an ideal tool for informing EYPP spending decisions and to support wider resource and training budget spends. We take this information into account alongside our nursery audits and cohort tracking.
Further information
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk
