In the villages around Cambridge – Yellow Door’s home, residents know harvest is happening when they hear tractors rumble by, see farmers putting their combine harvesters to work, and haystacks appearing in the fields. The fruit and vegetable stalls in the city market fill with autumnal produce: a celebration of hedgerows, orchards and fields.
We all want children to be outdoors and engaged with nature. In this blog we will consider the ethos of Forest School and compare it with other outdoor learning approaches that have become popular.
Heuristic play for young children is based on open-ended resources that can be explored and investigated, and encourage hypothesising (predicting what might happen).
Have you ever watched a child line up their toys again and again, spin the wheels of a car, or fill and empty a bag over and over? These patterns of behaviour are not random—they’re powerful clues into how young children learn. Known as schemas, these repeated actions reveal how children make sense of the […]
While we all like to be beside the seaside, it’s not always conveniently near us! Bring the beach to your setting with these exciting ideas.
A Montessori nursery follows the philosophies and teachings of Dr. Maria Montessori. It is designed to take advantage of the sensitive years between the ages of three and five, when the child is most able to absorb information from his environment.
Many two-year olds will spend more time with you in your setting than they do with their own parents, so it’s important to provide a caring and supportive environment where your children feel they belong. It needs to be thoughtfully laid out as well as practical.
This blog contains ideas that can be used with young children away from such tools to build up the skills and vocabulary needed for coding electronic devices. These have become known as pre-coding skills.
When we accompany children outdoors to learn, it can take them outside of their comfort zone; and it can do the same to us as practitioners. Many working in Early Years settings are worried about real and perceived risks that are present when children are active outdoors, and this can be one of the main […]
Children’s brains are hardwired to engage with the natural world, and unless they are exposed to such relevant environments on a regular basis, we risk denying them the opportunities they need for optimal brain development.