5 Top Tips for Parents: To help their child be ready to start school.

As a parent or carer, we can often feel a lot of pressure around getting our children ‘school ready’. We might have well intentioned parents, grandparents’ friends, who start conversations with “When so-so started school they were writing their name!”. As we live in a society that loves to compare and shows everyone’s best lives not their struggles this can often leave people feeling unsure, or like we are not doing good enough.

In our previous blog what is school readiness (read here), we discussed how school readiness is much more then perhaps the societal perceptions that have been held for many years. But actually, it is making sure that children have the underpinning communication and language, personal social and emotional and physical development in order to be ready to start school. So, for example, they can listen and follow instructions, they can express their wants and needs to others, they have good large and small physical movements, and they can play alongside others.

1.       Share books – Books are a great way of supporting children’s communication and language development. Also, it can help to create a love for literacy from a young age, is great for supporting personal, social, and emotional development as you bond with your child as you read. Also, books can help to support your child’s listening and attention skills.

2.       Sing nursery rhymes – There is lots of research out their showing how fantastic nursery rhymes are for supporting children’s communication and language development. As well as their early literacy development. Meme Fox is often famously quoted for saying that children who know 8 nursery rhymes by the age of 4 years old are some of the best readers at the age of 8 years old.

3.       Visit the park – Visit the local park and climb tree, roll down a hill, play on the swings, climb on the climbing frame and apparatus. Or take your bikes and scooters and go for a ride. Children need to have developed their proprioception, vestibular senses, and gross motor skills before they are ready to sit and show control over a pencil.

4.       Support your children to dress themselves – Practise doing fastenings for example, zips and buttons on clothes so that children can do this independently themselves. Encourage children to dress themselves in the morning. Teach them how to know which way round they put their shoes on, for example, using a sticker cut in half that they have to match up to get their shoes the right way round.

5.       Practise your route to school – Familiarity can help with the transition to school. So whether you will be walking, biking or taking the car practising the route to school and talking about what you see on the way can support children to become familiar and confident with the experience.

Block Play and Mathematical Development in the Early Years

Welcome to our next series in our block play series. This week we are going to be focusing on how block play can support children developing their mathematical skills through construction play. Mathematics is literally all around us and when children are playing and engaging, there is always potential for lots of opportunities to develop across all areas of the curriculum. Hands on experiences give children opportunities to learn about mathematics in a variety of contexts.

To find out more about mathematics being all around us why not check out our webinar recording ‘Mathematical All Around Us’.

Measuring in Block Play

Children use play to replicate their experiences and things that they observe others doing. This is an important way that children make connection and sense of the world around them. The introduction of resources such as tape measures and rulers can support children as they look at measuring their buildings and constructions. As they make comparisons about size, height and length of their buildings and constructions.

(Photo Credit: Pinterest)

Often this replication although supporting children’s ability to add narrative to their play and storylines alongside others (remember before children can write a story, they need to be able to tell stories with others!). But it can be limited by children’s mathematical skills, as to use a ruler or tape measure they often must understand and know large numbers to interact with this mathematical concept. Consider introducing resources that children can use that are non-standard units such as a set of handprints, multilink, footprints or Duplo. This means the children will be able to count the objects and incorporate mathematics into their play without adult support with large numbers.

Children will also problem solve, measure, and make comparisons of size and use a rich array of mathematical vocabulary such as bigger, smaller, tiny, longer, little, huge, shorter, and so on without the introduction of standard and non-standard units. As they join in conversations, they talk about their building and make comparisons. While they participate collaboratively to develop ideas. To stretch their understanding and their limits.

(Photo Credit: Project Matters)

A classic early year’s example, often children explore building towers often setting the challenge to see who can build a tower taller than themselves. This instantly lends itself to some discussions about size, as children may begin to make remarks such as “It is smaller than me!” Or “it is bigger than me!” This is a great opportunity for us as early years practitioners to extend learning in the moment. For example, introducing new language such as height, width, length and modelling a vast array of mathematical language. As we build and play alongside the children and build towers and make comparisons. There is also the opportunity to make comparisons between towers, for example, “How many blocks taller than you is your tower?”

Symmetry in Block Play

As children progress through the stages of block play in stage five (patterns and symmetry) they begin to make symmetrical buildings. This means that they are beginning to develop a basic understanding of symmetry and looking closely at patterns and similarities in buildings. They will also be developing an understanding of shapes and numbers as they explore making sure that they put the same shape and number of blocks in either side of the invisible line. For example, I need to red blocks, and one large brown cylinder and one large orange cylinder for either side. We may even begin to show a practical understanding of doubles or putting numbers together and learning simple number bonds.

Exploring Symmetry

When thinking about children who are beginning to explore symmetry and patterns in their block play. You might want to consider:

Do you have different coloured and shaped blocks?

Can you introduce mirrors to play and photos?

Can you bring in art activities that explore patterns and symmetry?

Making Buildings

Some children will be in the stage of block play when they are beginning to make representation of buildings. This is a great time to be incorporating house photos, and photos of different types of buildings where children can start to explore and talk about the natural patterns and symmetry in buildings. Additionally, think about adding clipboards and pens to promote early mark-making where children can design their own buildings.

Building designs can easily bring in mathematical concepts and vocabulary for example, sharing size of bricks, how many? Or does your building have windows? Whether that is part of a discussion or shared mark-making or individual mark-making with a skilled practitioner. You can easily build in children’s mathematical vocabulary and skills as they design and create their very own buildings.

If you would like to join our webinar, ‘The Potential of Block Play in the Early Years’ please click below to find out more or purchase your ticket now.

Embracing Schemas

“Thomas tips the basket of pom poms on the floor that you have just picked up for the 10th time in the last 30 minutes, your body sighs involuntary as you turn to assess the mess. You smile at Thomas, as he says “again, again” and begins to eagerly pick up all the items and place them back into the basket. Giving you a cheeky point counting as you throw them back into the basket. Thomas eagerly copies throwing the small pom poms.”

Schemas are repeated patterns of behaviour that children do in their play. These are vital and important to child development and how children make sense of the world. Sometimes schemas are the things that exhaust us, such as a basket being tipped on the floor for the 10th time. Or the things that parents will complain about the most for example, “Joshua just keeps throwing toys” or “Sophie has to line all the toys up before we can play with them!” The thing is the more we try to squash a child’s schema, not only is it nearly impossible for that child, but also the more likely we are going to see them exhibit those behaviours.

What we can do though is we can embrace these wonderful schemas of children. We can plan for those individual learning needs, embracing the holistic child and everything we know about them. Planning isn’t just that matching everything carefully to a learning objective from development matters or birth to five matters. (Which remember is not meant to be a tick list!).

So, let’s think about our Thomas a little bit more. What do we know about Thomas?

“Thomas regularly goes to the park with his parents, and they say how he particularly likes climbing up the stairs to the slide and going down. And shows little interest in the other apparatus at the park such as the tunnels, or balance toys.  He also quite often likes to sit at the top of the stairs by the stair gate and post his toys down the stairs through the stair gate. At nursery you have noticed that Thomas will spend lots of time tipping boxes out and watching the items fall. He also loves to draw and will draw straight vertical and horizontal lines across the piece of paper.”

This suggests that Thomas is learning through play in the trajectory schema this is showing an interest in the movement of himself and items and often throw toys. So, what possible things could you do or set up within your environment to support Thomas in his learning and development?

Coloured chick peas and cardboard tubes a great activity for exploring the trajectory schema.

1.       Explore ramps and gradients with the toy cars, trucks and trains.

2.       Have soft items that he can throw and explore the trajectory of, for example, fabric squares, pom poms, soft balls, feathers.

3.       Target games with bean bags where you can introduce shape recognition and number recognition.

4.       Playing with scarfs and ribbons on a windy day.

5.       Using gross motor skills to walk and move along vertical and horizontal lines.

6.       Mark making with cars.

7.       Lots of mark-making opportunities using different medians, e.g., chalk, pencils, crayons, pens or charcoal.

8.       Making kites and playing with them on a windy day.

9.       Have different size cardboard tubes for children to post objects through, for example, rice, chickpeas, pom poms.

10.   Opportunities to climb on apparatus.

These are simple activities or extensions that you can have within your enabling environment to support and embrace the schema that Thomas is currently in.

To find out more about the Trajectory schema, why not book on our webinar ‘Focus on the Trajectory Schema’? Or if you want to just have a general understanding of schemas, why not download our recorded webinar, ‘Again, Again, Again: Schema’s in the Early Years’?