Paula Hemphill

I am an Early Years Depute in a busy Nursery. I have worked in Early Years for over 15 years and 6 years as a Primary Teacher. I enjoyed the Froebel Certificate and look forward to enhancing my practice with the Froebelian Futures Project.

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Role/Location Projects

Becomings

– Changes to my thinking or practice which are emerging as a result of my current training –

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What I enjoy about working with young children

With recent staffing issues I have found myself working on the floor as a practitioner more than ever over the past 6 weeks. I have been able to put into practice some of the thoughts coming from recent training.

How I would describe my role now (is it changing as result of my training?)

With being in the playroom more to cover I have been able to role model recent training in action. This has included slowing down, to stop and reflect and actually observe rather thinking about what needs to be done next. In session 3 the spark was lit for how do children think and do we look at the reasons why children are thinking/doing what they are doing. It hit home when Tina Bruce talks about adults not noticing by watching.

When and how my PRACTICE is child-centred (have your views or practice changed?)

I put the quote "Adults need to know the world of children" on our board to provoke thought in our nursery.

The ways and extent to which my setting's ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS and PROCEDURES are child-centred (have your views or practice changed?)

At our most recent staff in-service day in November I decided a focus for one of our sessions would be on observations. I took many of the concepts from session 2 and 3 to talk about how do we include children's voice in the life of the nursery and do we include observations and non-verbal communication for our children who do not have a voice? I used the same question posed to us "what do we each understand by the terms children's voice or children's perspectives?". In the setting we have to ensure that we are including all children not just the one's with the loudest voices.

How children PARTICIPATE in shaping the environment, structures, rhythms and policies of my setting - or my own day-to-day role (have your views or practice changed?)

This is an area we are developing following our in-service day. We have created a wall display to capture what our children are thinking/changes they want to make to the playroom/what resources they want from the resource book to evidence their voices/perspectives.

How Froebel/Froebelian thinking informs or inspires my practice today (have your views or practice changed?)

Jane spoke about Block Play which I think will be our project within the nursery. We have limited block play in both our playrooms and staff have worked at creating an area where they can play and explore. During the recent in-service training I delivered a session on Block Play to talk about the benefits, stages, risk assessments and setting up the area. This training has inspired both myself and staff in changing the block play area, adding clipboards, books, material and name tags of each block.

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Learning journal

Reflections on my developing practice over the three stages of learning: Beginnings, Becomings and Recent.

Beginnings Becomings Recent