Can I Go and Play Now?. Greg Bottrill
are really to have their voices heard, then we need to ensure that we are not blocking the airwaves with what we perceive to be their best interests, with what we want or need them to learn.
Your adult voice cannot be their voice
With the best will in the world, your half-termly themes such Spring, Chinese New Year, People Who Help Us, Under The Sea, Dinosaurs, and so on are not the children’s voice – they are yours. Nowhere in the EYFS does it say that these topics are what needs teaching, yet we find them in many Reception classes being taught year in and year out. But have the children expressed a desire to find out about these things? Have they ever once talked about or demonstrated how they would love to explore the role of the dentist to the extent that every bit of the continuous provision resembles a dental practice with a neat and tidy People Who Help Us display? I’m not denying that some of these themes contain within them some important messages, but I would equally argue that it doesn’t need often tenuous links to a theme because the adults have it in their planning and have had it in their planning since three years ago.
Thematic approaches are adult-led without a doubt – they drown out the child’s interests, look beyond them through a fug of ‘planned activity’ and prescribed outcome. A child-led approach is wild and free, it roams from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, sometimes veering off, sometimes simple, sometimes brilliant, sometimes soaring, often taking you to places you could never imagine: always exciting, always something different, forever changing, never standing still. Always, always beautiful.
‘Don’t be afraid of yourself ...’ Old Coast Road, The Church
So on one side we have the child’s world and on the other the adult’s. How to make the two come together, how to meet the needs and rights of the child to explore and discover while at the same time meeting our own adult needs for measurable progress and outcome? By itself, the beauty of children’s natural desire to interpret and express their world could quite happily exist without the influence of the adult world, but the need for data and accountability demands adult influence. The Senior Leadership Team demands an outcome.
In Early Years, the ‘goal’ is for the maximum number of children within your class to make Early Learning goals or above. It’s the crude measuring stick for both the child’s and your success. It’s the per cent that keeps you awake at night and makes you reach for that second glass of red on a Tuesday evening. The subsequent chapters of this book are going to show you just how to achieve this while balancing the need for children to be free, happy and childlike. Before we get to those chapters, we need to make sure that in our minds two things are clear: skills-focused learning and children’s Next Steps. Without these two central tenets you will never achieve your adult-led outcomes. As soon as you invest time and energy into creating a seascape in the Water Zone with magnetic letters and pretty sprinkles floating in the food-coloured water you are turning your back on skill-focused learning. If you find yourself doing circle time because that’s what you do every week on a Wednesday afternoon before home time, then you are turning your back. If your children are operating in a factory line waiting for the TA to ‘help’ them make a Mother’s Day card, then you are turning your back.
Everything, every detail of your day has to be committed to skills growth, to children applying their skills to situations and experiences, and opening up opportunities to develop new ones alongside them. Do you spend three weeks of Autumn term rehearsing your class Nativity? Ask yourself what skills are being truly developed. It’s a blunt question and if the answer is either ‘because we always do it’ or ‘because the parents like it’, then your Nativity might be something to rethink.
To achieve skills growth effectively, you need to know your children’s Next Steps
This is the key to enabling your faith in children to really show and take root in your classroom. This is perhaps the hardest thing to get right and the one that needs experimentation and perseverance. Children don’t necessarily learn in a linear way; they are not on a straight line from point A to point B. Their minds flip and switch, weave, retread, dip and soar across a year. They may show understanding one day but then the next day find the same thing challenging. Our role is to persist and repeat, and above all to give them opportunities to engage and re-engage. You will find their next steps sometimes appear from nowhere. At other times they are very clear. Children always bring their next steps into their learning – their voice is always telling you something.
Clear assessment is important here, whether it is recorded in a table, plotted on a diagram, or mentally noted. The one thing that is crucial is that you hold to the concept that each child is an individual with individual next steps. Red Group, Blue Group, Yellow Group approaches cannot work day in day out here. Yes, it can be useful sometimes to put children together in such a way, but in truth each child’s rate of development is unique to them. If you accept this and make each child’s next steps the focal point of your day, then your children will make progress – it’s almost impossible for them not to. In truth, you can find out a child’s next steps very quickly by interacting with them and talking, engaging them in an ad hoc assessment. Essentially, you need to find out what a child can do, then think – now what? If a child can consistently segment words and blend them is their Next Step not then to read by sight? If they can recognise numerals 0–10 with ease, is their Next Step not to be shown the patterns of numerals 11–20? If they cannot count 1:1, then what is stopping them? Is it their lack of ability to touch each object to be counted, is it their inability to say the numbers in the correct sequence? It goes beyond that they simply can’t count. We need to unpick the specifics and work on those so they can move forward.
In subsequent chapters we’ll explore this idea further, but for now ask yourself whether you are ready to open your own mind to moving away from what is a essentially a KS1/KS2 model of grouping children. Can you see that children are individuals, with their own unique voice, mind and developmental needs? I think that this is one of the most exciting ways of seeing children. Apply a sense of freedom to the children and yourself. After all, do we not see ourselves as individuals in the adult world? Are we not aware of our own distinct nature, are we not frequently driven by our own minds to try to be different from others? If I am due to go to a social event and someone happens to say, ‘Oh, I can’t wait for you to meet so-and-so. You’ll get on really well, they’re just like you’, then a petulant part of me will go out of my way to deliberately not get on with them because I see myself as individual. I don’t want to be like the next person – I want to be me. I think this analogy works with children, too. They exist deeply in their ‘me-ness’ and it is this that we need to recognise in the classroom – we need to meet them on the level of their individuality.
Chapter 2 Making their Universe the Right Universe
‘I feel like I’m just treading water. Is it the same for you?’ – Antichrist, The 1975
I love the colour grey in my home. I love grey paint on walls, grey sofas, grey radiators, grey armchairs. I watch films and find myself looking beyond the characters and the action to see what colour the walls are. Most of the film What Lies Beneath went by me because I was so intent on deciding whether Michelle Pfeiffer’s walls were battleship or gun-metal grey. I choose to paint walls in my house grey because I find it relaxing and calming. It goes with pops of colour courtesy of wallpaper and cushions. Grey makes my home home.
Now consider your classroom space
Is the space calming? Is it a home for the children? Is it representing your own idea of what you think a classroom should look like, is it decorated with online-acquired displays, posters and huge intricate boards in garish primary hues? We need to begin to ask ourselves: what is it that children need around them to truly learn, feel safe and feel like the classroom is somewhere that they can call their own.
Your objective should be to create a universe that they can operate within that is their universe not the adults’ nor the adults’ idea of what that universe should look like. Go on Pinterest right now and search for classroom ideas. You’ll