Pauline Milsted Pauline Milsted

10 Top Tips for Helping Children to Settle into a New Academic Year

With September just around the corner and the summer nearly over, we thought we would share our top ten tips for helping children to settle into their new class or room this September.

With September just around the corner and the summer nearly over, we thought we would share our top ten tips for helping children to settle into their new class or room this September. Whether you have completed visits to other settings, home visits, all about me books, or settle sessions. Or feel like you haven’t quite done enough yet. There are still practical things that we can do in the first few days to help children to settle quickly into the new year.

 

1. Make sure that all children have a named peg (or photo on a peg) for their first day to help them feel settled and like they belong.

2. Set-up an activity or guide them to an area of the room based on what you know about their likes and interests. For example, on the get to know you teacher day, Amelia’s mum said she loves to play with babies at home. On her first day make sure that the babies are out in the role-play area for her to play with.

3. For children who have English as an Additional Language make sure that you know keywords in their home language or have pictorial cards to help them communicate. For example, toilet, home, snack, food, drink. To ensure that they are able to communicate their basic needs with you.

Recording of Webinar Supporting Children with English as an Additional Language
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Recording of Webinar Supporting Children with English as an Additional Language
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4. Spend time in the first few days establishing the routine with your children. Use a visual time table to help the children know what is coming next in the day.

5. Try and ensure the same person if possible greets them in their first week, offering consistency and a familiar face.

6. Take time to agree class or room rules alongside the children, giving them ownership for the space as co-owners. Not an adults space that they are stepping into.

The Voice of the Child Audit
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The Voice of the Child Audit
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7. Spend time with children 1 on 1 and in small groups to help establish good positive relationships early on. For example, it might be sharing a book together or sitting and drawing together.

8. For children with special educational needs or disabilities, ensure that you have planned and prepared as a team how you are going to meet their needs. If they need additional support with tasks - what will that look like? Who will lead this?

9. Ensure that you have an environment, resources and interactions that promote emotional literacy. For example, emotion resources, opportunities to talk with children about how they might be feeling. Some children may not have the vocabulary yet and might need resources to help them communicate with others there feelings.

10. Get the parents to send in a photo from home of something that the children have done over the summer holiday’s. This can be a great talking point and then can be displayed or made into a book of our summer holiday’s.

 

What are your top tips for helping children to settle into a new room or class this September? We would love to hear them.

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Supporting Preschool Children's Emotional Intelligence Webinar Recording
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Pauline Milsted Pauline Milsted

School Readiness Series: What is School Readiness?

With last week being the day that expectant parents across the UK find out what primary school their children had been accepted into the term ‘school readiness’ has come back into focus. ..

With last week being the day that expectant parents across the UK find out what primary school their children had been accepted into the term ‘school readiness’ has come back into focus. As schools, nurseries, childminders, preschools, and families get ready for those all-important transitions into reception in September 2023. And teachers in primary schools and families across the UK are helping children to prepare and become ready for their transition into Key Stage One.

 

School readiness has been a term that has been widely used in the past several years, particularly alongside the focus of concerns that more and more children across the UK are not ready to start school. For example, Watkins (2018) from Save the Children discussed how the UK government claims that 1 in 4 children are not meeting the expected level of development before starting school and how we are already letting them down. This has shockingly increased in the covid-19 pandemic where reception class teachers reported in a government survey that more then half their children were not ready to start reception and 88% of teachers and teaching assistants were having to spend more of their time with children who were not reaching their developmental milestones (Lawler 2022).

So, this leaves us with the question of what does school readiness actually look like? PHE (2015, p.4) defines “School readiness is a measure of how prepared a child is to succeed in school cognitively, socially and emotionally.” Although, it is worth noting that there is no national definition of school readiness and is somewhat a debate of what age group school readiness applies to; is these children starting school in reception or is it getting them ready to begin their journey into the national curriculum and key stage one? (Ofsted 2014). This is before the then criteria differ from setting to setting as to our own pedagogical beliefs, curriculum and what we view as being school ready.

 

For the sake of this blog series, we are considering what school readiness looks like for those children that are going into reception class in September. Below is an image of page 6 from the document Improving School Readiness Creating a Better Start for London by Public Health England (PHE) (2015). Highlighting their views of what school readiness at the age of 4 looks like and the skills, development, and experiences we are expecting our 4-year-olds to have.

This document is also a very useful document for highlighting the why (intent) behind focusing on school readiness in the UK and the benefits of investing in school readiness to support children’s development, learning and the impact on future outcomes.

Another, popular poster that is commonly used with early years settings is The Road to School poster by Nursery Resources. This poster shares similar skills and attributes that as an early year’s community we are looking for children to be able to do to be school ready. As well as the steps to starting school from PACEY.

Find a downloadable version of this here from PACEY.

To me as an early year’s consultant being school ready is having a good level of development in the prime areas, communication and language, physical development, and personal, social and emotional development. As well as having begun to develop a lifelong love for learning, based in being curious and inquisitive. It is being able to talk about your own emotions and coregulating alongside experienced teachers. It is being independent for example, dressing yourself, feeding yourself, being able to make choices, having confidence to talk to others that are in your class. It is having the basic communication and language needs to listen and pay attention, to communicate their needs and to share ideas and make friends. It is also about have good gross motor and fine motor skills ready for learning. Everything else will come at the time that is right for the children. Because these3 areas of learning are going to underpin everything, so being school ready is making sure children are strong and confident in these areas of learning!

References:

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