In the beginning...

When I first began teaching I secured a teaching position in Year One and was lucky enough to be in a forward-thinking school that gave me the support of TWO teaching assistants (lucky or what?!) for my thirty children and encouraged me to develop a play-based approach.  I attended lots of lovely training on play-based provision in year One and ended up teaching a mixture of play-based sessions, with me teaching ‘in the moment,’ alongside more structured maths and literacy lessons which I alternated each day.

I had a fantastic few years encouraging the children to lead their own learning, whilst I became fascinated with storytelling and fantasy play. I then moved schools and became Head of EYFS in a large three form entry primary with a Nursery.  I worked in both Nursery and Reception and my understanding of child development began to grow. I started to look more deeply into how young children’s brains work, the importance of levels of well-being and involvement and, of course, the magic of PLAY! I worked in this school for a few more years and learnt a great deal, becoming an assistant head and SLE before deciding that it was time for another move. I took the plunge and moved to a three-form infant school in September 2017 and over the last year have led the EYFS team to develop a play-based approach in Reception with no topics, very few adult-led sessions and very little forward planning. Instead we allow the children to follow their own interests, giving them as much time and space as we can to play. During the upcoming year we intend to take this approach further into Year One and so that’s what I’ll be focusing on from September onwards (as well as continuing to keep an eye on the excitement going on in Reception of course!).

Year One seems to be on everybody’s minds at the moment and I get a lot of messages online and visitors to the school asking about what our plans are and how we are going to set things up and so I’ve decided to blog about it here. I’m not much of a writer but hopefully it will answer some questions for anyone who’s interested. 😊