Early Years Summit 2018  

 

I have just finished watching the first of many interviews from the 2018 early years summit, organised by Kathy Brodie. The summit is a week-long FREE online CPD extravaganza for all things relating to outdoor play and learning, consisting of daily interviews with a range of experts. It is rare that CPD is given freely these days much less by experts such as these, so sign up while you can! https://www.earlyyearssummit.com/

I have just finished watching interviews with Juliet Robertson (Creative Star/I’m a teacher get me outside here!) and Julie Ann White who founded Nature to Nurture and won Nursery World’s pre-school of the year.

I was lucky enough to participate in a training session with Juliet, a few years ago. She exudes passion for teaching outdoors and I came away buzzing with ideas for teaching across the curriculum.  I have been an avid follower of her blog ever since.  During the interview, Juliet made some really interesting links between early exploratory experiences, such as crawling into confined spaces and how this informs later understanding of mathematical concepts such as geometry. There is far less information about teaching maths outside than for any other curriculum area, so it was great that her interview had maths as the focus.

I hadn’t come across Nature to Nurture before and am now keen to know much more as Julie Ann’s pedagogy goes against the perceived wisdom that children are most alert earlier in the day when literacy and maths are usually taught.  She asserts that children need to be physically active during the morning as this develops core stability and supports the development of listening and attention later in the day.  Her work on sensory input and stimulation for children with additional needs was fascinating as was the development of a resource free environment to better enable imagination and creativity.

These are only two of the many experts that will be speaking during the summit this week.  I can’t wait to find out more!