Risky Play
Why do we advocate risky play at Inspirations?
‘Encouraging children to enjoy challenges rather than to shy away from them, could also increase their persistence and learning abilities.’ - (Dweck 2000)
We are reading more and more to support this view in the paper and in the news. Children are becoming so mollycoddled and protected that certain traits like independence, resilience, creativity and confidence are being eroded away. It is this erosion of critical life skills that has driven Inspirations move towards our Reggio Emilio inspired approach to learning and our Forest School ethos. Both pedagogies allow for environments rich in learning opportunities including those gained from taking risks and learning to manage those risks.
So, what is risky play?
Risky play is how we allow, encourage even, our children to explore, examine and play within areas, or with equipment, which could be determined as carrying a measured level of risk. Examples of risky play within our Nursery environment would show themselves particularly within our Forest school ethos where children are encouraged to climb, slip and slide in mud, traverse small streams, swing on rope swings and use tools such as hammers and potato peelers for whittling wood.
Of course, measured risk is not limited to our Forest School children, our babies and toddlers have balance beams to traverse, uneven ground to manoeuvre through and even nettles which are purposefully left within our garden as part of our measured risky play policy.
How does risky play help build more resilient, independent confident children?
Taking measured risk gives children the opportunity to fail, learn and adapt processes. It naturally encourages children to be determined and resilient to failure, which in turn shows them the flip-side of failure: success!
It is a beautiful thing to observe children helping their friends, problem solving together, building up their teamwork and communicative skills and showing such compassion, support and encouragement to one another during particularly challenging moments. The beauty is, that each child understands that they may be the supportive one on this occasion, next time though it could be them needing the support of their peers!
Obviously failing can be a stressful, uncomfortable feeling, one which as adults we can fully understand. But it is important that our children are able to manage their stress and know that they have the skills and understanding to overcome it. It's important that they realise it is a temporary state of mind that, once managed and overcome can in fact lead to great success.
Here at Inspirations children can traverse manageable challenges and are able to experience small levels of temporary fear and stress finding they have ways of overcoming it. This leads to adults who have a balanced view and approach to risk.
Risky play should not be…
..Dangerous! You may have noticed throughout this blog I have consistently used the word measured. This word is paramount when talking about any risk but particularly so when working alongside children. At Inspirations our risk assessments are carried out on a daily basis whether they be in written form or within our day-to-day observations of children’s play and interactions with each other.
We are constantly assessing the levels of risk and putting in place management strategies for those risks. This may be as simple as ‘it’s too windy to go into the woods today as hanging dead wood may fall off trees’ to 'that piece of equipment is looking worn and needs fixing or replacing'. At all times you can rest assured our team of highly qualified educators are adept and assessing and keeping our children safe whilst at the same time offering all the joys and learning opportunities of MEASURED risky play! Win, win…
Pumpkin Picking
It's that's time of year again...
The time that nature hands us natural learning supplies by the plenty. Conkers, acorns and fallen leaves are brought into our learning environment to inspire creativity, discussions, and all kinds of learning through play.
In the Art Studio, the children are inspired by Leaf Man, making their own leaf people and arrangements on the Lightbox. But there is one thing missing: pumpkins!
Every year we take our pre-school children to Kemps Farm- Horsforth Pick your own. In spring they open up for strawberry and fruit picking. In Autumn they provide thousands of pumpkins all shapes sizes and colours. How lucky we are that this is on our door step.
So on this crisp cold but sunny Thursday morning in October we counted heads, suited up and set out for our Autumn adventure.
A Beautiful Day
When we arrived it was a little different to last year, much to their delight, this time we had a tractor ride to the field. Just 5 minutes from nursery and we somehow felt like we were in the middle of the countryside. Next year the tractor driver said he might even drive us right back to nursery.
As we meandered around the one way dirt tracks through the fields of orange the children selected the pumpkins to bring back. Orange, white, green, bumpy, they selected a total variety. The terrain added to the adventure, climbing over the winding stalks and wading through the mud was a naturally formed assault course. We definitely recommend wellies!
Wheel barrows full and imaginations captured we began our walk back to Inspirations. We arrived back to our yurt in time for our Spaghetti Bolognese and we look forward to showing you what we do with our chosen pumpkins next week. Watch this space.
Happy Halloween!
-Nathalie
Our Baby Rooms
Where it all begins...
For most of our parents, this will be the first time away from their little ones. It is our aim across both of our baby rooms to ensure this experience is as smooth as possible.
Our cosy, creative and nurturing baby rooms, The Hedgehog Room and The Butterflies room will work closely with parents or carers to welcome them into our community and to adapt to home schedules, easing them in with sessions.
Our Reggio Emilia ethos is evident through out our whole nursery, and just like the other rooms our babies are indeed the centre of their own learning. When creating our baby room’s our aim was to create a nurturing adaptable environment to support their growth and learning and each stage of development.
The space, the resources and the staff are all there to create a home away from home, a fun, creative, musical space to stimulate them as they navigate through their first year.
Loose parts display them selves a little differently here, we have safe larger loose parts such as wheels, tubes, large pine cones, cable reels. The room layout and resources change from week to week to mirror the children’s interests.
We will go into the key person and settling in process in more detail in our next blog, but for now, let us introduce you to our two baby rooms.
The Hedgehog Room
Lead by Tara, with Sophie as deputy, the Hedgehog room is sectioned into 2 parts. Part one has a large floor space where materials and art supplies are brought in daily for messy play and creativity. From hand painting, to gloop, to sand, ice, bubbles, cardboard boxes, no two days are the same when it comes to the resources in this area.
There is a loose part area, a small world area, pots and pans, puppets and a large round table for meal times accompanied by high chairs.
Part two is a carpeted movement area with mirrors, projectors, cushions and a large climbing frame, bridge and slide, where the children sleep.
The Butterflies Room
Lead by Becki, our second baby room is joined to the Hedgehogs Room via the shared nappy room that has recently been painted with an under the sea theme by our Atelierista. Like The Hedgehogs room, The Butterflies room as the area for creativity and a carpet area for movement and play, as well as constantly changing natural resources. There is also a darkened sensory room filled with lights and glowing artefacts.
Outdoor play is of equal importance to indoor play and the Baby rooms are no exception. Our outdoor spaces are an extension of their rooms, with opportunities to explore a mud kitchen, bikes and beds of lavender for additional sensory play. By having a big emphasis on outdoor play we help prepare the children for forest school and outdoor learning as they move up to the next rooms. This week the baby room went on a trip to the forest, where they noticed a new interest in mark making in the mud with sticks.
With a focus on nurturing your baby through those first months, our focus is on settling you and your baby, ensuring that you are both happy and well cared for. Close relationships are formed making the transition from home to nursery smooth with you feeling supported and your baby comforted and loved.
If you want to know more about our baby rooms or are interested in enrolling please get in touch https://inspirationsnurseries.co.uk/contact-us/
-Nathalie
Ambiguous Resources 2
Have you ever made a car or a rocket from a cardboard box? We most definitely have. A saying we hear a lot is “they play with the box, more than the toys inside”. At Inspirations, we have also witnessed this, and observed that children gain a lot of skills from this type of play.
The children ‘making something out of nothing’ is teaching them to be resourceful and using their imaginations. I always remember the fairy liquid advert, the little boy waited weeks and weeks for the empty bottle so he could create a rocket with it. It doesn’t stop at just creating artwork. You can reuse many things to make for other uses which we will talk about a little later in this blog.
At Inspirations, we use loose parts (see our previous loose parts blog). The purpose of them, is that they are so versatile and allow the children to make whatever they wish.
A plastic car is only a plastic car, whereas a stick could be a magic wand or a person or wherever your imagination will take you. It is the same when reusing resources to make something else with the added bonus that we are recycling an item, instead of throwing it away.
We like to do this with a lot of items, including household items. For example old microwaves, iPads, toasters and typewriters in the home corner for the children to use during role play. Using ‘real’ items ensures the children learn to respect things too. If a child drops or throws a plastic cup, there is no consequence that comes from that. Whereas, if they dropped a glass, it would smash and they could no longer play with it. In the art studio, they use glass pots that were dessert pots for paint. We use a lot of apple crates, wooden palettes, and cable reels for our equipment.
These are valuable pieces of equipment for us as well as excellent large loose parts for the children to use when being creative. The cable reels in the baby and toddler rooms have been decorated with different themes. One of them is a car theme with a road and ramps available to be put on the side where they choose. The other is a farm theme with Astro turf stuck on and a farmland scene painted on with a 3d effect. We also reuse tyres for large loose parts or even as planters or a sand pit! The babies have reused bicycle wheels to support the rotation schema- please see our ‘being two, what are schemas’ blog. We reuse bottles and create sensory bottles in the baby and toddler room. The preschoolers have reused bottles for planting.
This is just another valuable learning opportunity for the children to gain the skills to reuse things, rather than adding to the waste on Earth. We get a lot of our equipment from SCRAP (scrap creative reuse Arts Project Ltd) as we have spoken about in our ‘make something out of nothing’ blog. We also rely on the practitioners collecting and then our wonderful families donating things that they think we can reuse. Car boot sales and charity shops are a great find for getting things to reuse.
Next time you want to throw something away, perhaps think again, it might just be our children's next project waiting to happen.
-Kayleigh
Into The Woods- Our Song
The children of Inspirations would like to share with you our very own Inspirations Original song written by Nathalie and the Pre-Schoolers. Every day upon entering the forest we greet 'Mr Owl' of Hunger Hill Woods, so we put this greeting to a tune on the ukulele. Please find the lyrics below if you want to sing along at home, if you woud like the chords just get in touch.
Into The Woods
Into the woods we go
To lose our mind our body and soul
As we leave our world behind
What Might we find?
Mr Owl I see you hurray!
Good afternoon may we enter today?
There's beauty here, we'd love to share
We tread lightly with care
We hear the wind through the trees and it whispers hello
We see the leaves change from brown onto green and yellow
Every's a new day in the forest we know
ooo ooo ooo ooo
Out of the woods we go
To lose our mind our body and soul
As we leave our world behind
What might we find?
Mr Owl I see you hurray!
Good afternoon may we leave today?
There's beauty here, we loved to share
We tread lightly with care
We hear the wind through the trees and it whispers hello
We see the leaves change from brown onto green and yellow
Every's a new day in the forest we know
ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo
Little Litter Pickers
It was during one of our daily Forest School trips that one of our Pre-School children expressed disappointment at finding litter on the ground. We decided to order some litter pickers and set out on an adventure to clean up Horsforth.
At least once a week now a small group set off around Horsforth with Litter Pickers and a bag, collecting every item of trash they see along the way. So far we have met some wonderful people who stop and thank the children. It's a wonderful way of getting exercise, meeting our locals and helping our community.
Watch the video here-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N-yULXVwjk
We're proud of our children for noticing the world around them and caring about the place they live. Would you like to help make Horsforth a cleaner place? Check out the Horsforth Litter Pickers group on facebook.
Spring Time in the Forest
A time for adaptation and growth.
"The stream is following us."
Our adventures into Hunger Hills Woods continue to inspire us all and recently we have discovered a new favourite hide out. In our "fairy tree" a local toy shop has installed a skateboard swing which the children love to play on. The surrounding area is equally awe-inspiring with an existing 'twig-wam', a large fallen Rowan tree and a stunning new growth of Beech trees which, since coming into leaf provide a wash of yellow and green light across the glade.
Seekers of Meaning
New Video
Over the last few weeks I have been filming the children as they explore the Art Studio. To read more about our Art studio you can go back to last weeks blog.
The children's current shared interest is construction and building houses from clay, bricks, sticks and blocks. Some of that is captured in our brand new video that you can watch here-
https://www.yout
ube.com/watch?v=4-59qb9GgdQ
The Art Studio
Every morning and afternoon our Pre-Schoolers choose where they want to spend their time, between the Yurt/Outdoor Classroom, Forest School or the Art Studio. There is a quaint pebbled path that leads us behind the Yurt, past the new pond and up to this purpose built creative space, but this isn't just any art classroom, we do things a little differently here. http://simonr30.sg-host.com/the-art-room/
Why do we have an Art Studio?
Of course creativity is woven throughout every aspect of our learning at Inspirations, there are mark making tools, paints and clay accessible in all areas, so why do we need an additional separate creative space? The Art Studio, (referred to as an Atelier in the Reggio culture) is so much more than just an Art Room. It is its own separate space for the children to own, re-purpose and re-visit week after week, and is set out to foster self discovery.
100 Languages of Learning
It is a space for smaller groups of children to branch off, be heard, share ideas, and develop the confidence to be leaders of their own research and learning. It is an environment that plays host to books, materials and tools that support the 100 ways of learning with the support of myself as the Atelierista. It is a space where children proceed through their inquiry to reach their hypothesis though guided experiments, mixed media, play, music, light and shadow, sculpture and dramatic play. A space for them to give meaning to, give identity to, and in turn put them selves and their ideas into context within the world they live in.
The walls of the Art Studio are a canvas, a projector screen, an art exhibition and a metaphorical mirror reflecting the evolving learning journey of our children. Through photos and quotes of the children's voice on the wall the children can see where their ideas started, where they are now, and by reading back the children's own words they see that their inputs are recorded, valued and remembered.
It's also important to note that the Atelierista is not an art teacher, rather, an Artist who knows the potential of art materials and children, and the limitless possibilities when these are combined.
Beautiful Mistakes
In the Art Studio the children are not afraid to try new things, because fear of failure doesn't exist. How can it exist in a place where mistakes are simply learning opportunities. A fallen glue pot can become an art project in its self, and a drawing gone wrong can inspire new ideas. One project that stands out began when a child wiped up spilt watercolour paint from the floor with a baby wipe and watched as the colours soaked through the wipe. He then decided to add baby wipes to a canvas, the 'dirty' baby wipes themselves then becoming the art.
Seekers of Meaning
As constant seekers of meaning, our children are making sense of the world around them with everything they do, and our Art studio is one section of our pre-school that fosters this.
This week we will be filming inside the Art Studio to see their explorations brought to life, this short film will be shared on You Tube next week.
- Nathalie
Pre-School at Adel
Are you longing to peer into the future, catch a glimpse of normality resuming once again? I think we can agree this is going on longer than we initially imagined, but here we are. We are still in this together, and we hope during these times of increased social distancing you can still maintain social connections online, just like those in this news story that brought a smile to our faces. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-55732174
So we start this blog by asking, how are you, and what are you grateful for? We are grateful to have our Inspirations Nurseries families that continue to bring a sense of community.
Last week our blog focused on our Horsforth Pre-School, so this week we hand over to Deborah our manager at Adel to talk about our other Inspirations Nursery only 10 minutes away.
Welcome to Adel
At Adel we take children from the age of three, to starting school. Like Horsforth, we follow the Reggio Emilia Approach, which comprises of loose parts, mirrors and reflection, natural resources and investigation of up-cycled and recycled trinkets and materials.
Our setting is within the grounds of Adel St John the Baptist Primary School which is surrounded by beautiful woods and trees. There’s a well-equipped natural garden with a climbing wall, workbench, piano, mud kitchen and bikes. We have the use of the super large playing field and the conservation area which we use twice weekly for Forest School.
Our planning involves the outdoors as much as indoors and the children can choose where they would like to play.
Inside we have a very spacious room with areas to promote learning wherever the children choose to be.
Set Out to Inspire
The aim of our pre-school environments is to inspire the children to want to explore and learn. We have a maths, literacy, construction, small world, home and creative area of which all have natural resources for the children to explore and a wide range of loose parts to promote maths, communication, imagination and problem solving.
After observing the children’s common interests, we plan as a team to add resources and challenges to the areas and talk to the children about what they know and what they want to know, and how they would like to learn.
The children’s key worker also plans for their key children’s individual interests to support and provide opportunities to progress in all areas of development. As we are a pre-school we encourage independence and all skills necessary for school readiness, such as being able to express their own needs, listen to others and stories, separate from their carer, independent self-care, and understanding of British Values which encourages respect for ourselves and others.
Phonic, Spanish and Creativity
We teach phonics which is differentiated to meet and challenge each child’s individual ability. At Adel we also introduce Spanish to the children; an introduction to languages through songs, games and activities promoting enthusiasm with learning languages later in school. We also have our own Atelierista who comes in 3 times a week to deepen creative projects in smaller groups.
Throughout both our Pre-School settings we support your children in becoming strong independent learners, enabling them to think critically and outside the box. Their use of imagination and their understanding of the world, alongside their ability to problem solve, will stand them out from the crowd and give them a head start in life.
If you love our nursery as much as we do, have any questions or are interested in joining us check out more on the website here-http://simonr30.sg-host.com/our-settings/adel/ or contact- deborah@inspirationsnurseries.co.uk