Blog

Kathy Brodie’s fantastic Early Years Summit was on last week.

If you didn’t watch it I strongly urge you to do so! Kathy brought us interviews with Childcare experts specialising in lots of different areas. It’s a fantastic way to learn through other people’s experiences and insights, from the comfort of your own home or office.

You can access all the videos here

The theme of the 2018 summit was ‘Leading Practitioners, Leading Practice’ and the overwhelming conclusion that I came to after watching the interviews was that:

Happy children learn and happy teachers teach!

This is probably most obvious in the early years, but it’s applicable right across the board.

Happiness enables learning.

Finding out what your children are interested in, what they actively engage with and what they choose to spend their time doing allows you to work out where they are in terms of development, but also with regards to their personality.

Once you’ve worked out what makes them tick, it’s so much easier to engage them in learning activities. You can then introduce activities that encourage further exploration of something they already enjoy doing and have chosen for themselves – leading to endless, highly engaged learning opportunities.

Don’t worry about what was planned, or what fits the current theme, worry about what engages the children and slowly expand on that.

As Alistair Bryce Clegg so brilliantly put it; “We want engaged children, not compliant children.” The same theory applies to Practitioners too.

Play is just as important for adults, after all, we’re just children that got big! But somewhere along the line, we separated work and play, the two things are no longer combined.

Make sure you and your staff are happy in your roles. Organise get-togethers outside of the workplace so that your team become friends rather than just co-workers. Happy staff members are more engaged and motivated and are much better educators and role models.

We pulled together some tips to keep your staff happy and engaged. You can read them here: