JacquieL

What about " Look what I can do" ? I think that My Learning Journey is enough really, fitting in with 'Continuing the Learning Journey' at KS1

Work is a terrible word isn't it as it's meaning depends on who is listening to it. EYs staff know what it means but unfortunately other staff see it as something quite different although 'play is the child's work' isn't it ?!

Have a great day!

Your plan is really good and will be very helpful to everyone, as they are all in the same boat as you, updating to fit in with the EYFS. If you take on board some of the recommendations just remember not to make it over complicated, but simple and straight forward for everyone to read and understand. A few plans I have seen have had so much content that no-one would bother to read it all. I would just alter the order of words in the following section so that similar things are together as I have done here.

Squeezing

Prodding

Poking

Pressing

Rolling

Grasping

Squashing

Smelling

Mark making

Making patterns

Modelling

1-1 correspondence

Counting

Extending imaginative play

Tidying up and caring for resources

You might also want to mention somewhere about using different types of flours, adding items to create different textures etc.

Best of luck with the rest as it is a marathon task.

Love it!

You can restrict who you share the photos with on flickr if you wish.

An interesting article on Enabling Environments has been added today and if you go back to the Home page you'll find it. That has some good links on it for play equipment which might help.

Yes best of luck. I don't think that you need to be too worried about the Christian faith aspect from what you have said. They will be looking for an excellent practitioner first and foremost, but obviously in a church pre-school will want someone who is happy to support Christian ethos and perhaps occasionally take a small part in church life. This is unlikely to be onerous, more about what you have mentioned the Nativity, Easter and perhaps stories from the Bible. I'm also sure that they would be very happy for you to support the multicultural and spiritual aspects of the EYFS. They probably need to be sure you are not likely to object to that, or to opt out as some teachers can in schools.

Have a really wonderful day!

I feel totally exhausted reading about your parents working life Peggy. What a fantastic upbringing though! I used to go on YHA with a group on friends when I was young and had a great time.

I love the story about the loo Inge.

We all have these fascinating memories and these are the living history of everyday lives. My parents occasionally tell me tales about their young lives or the war years. All these stories will be lost when they are gone. I wonder what todays generation will consider their history?

Very well done and well worth adding to the Resources Library for anyone else to reference when writing theirs. How very short sighted your advisory staff are. Collecting ideas from other people, so that you are not reinventing the wheel and considering other people's ideas not only saves time but helps you to clarify your own thinking. Isn't this called research? As long as you discuss with your own staff, so that you are all agreed on your philosophy and have a common understanding, then what on earth is wrong with that. I bet they research and consult, or at least I hope they do.

Amazing isn't it Peggy? Every summer day was sunny and we always had snow in the winter. I wonder if it was true or were we just sunny minded children remembering all the good things in our lives.

Inge you must have some really interesting memories from your visits to your family abroad.

My mother is French and I remember visiting France ever year when I was very young. I remember my mother washing my brothers nappies in the river near my Aunt's farm house, and each day I used to ride the donkey home with the cream churn on each side and taking the cream to my aunt to make butter. She slapped it into shape between two wooden paddles. I also remember drinking some of the cider they made on their Normandy farm, from a tap on the barrel. We also drank wine mixed with water when we were very young ( is that why I am a bit of a wino now I wonder )

My first horse ride was on my aunt's farm in France!

You young things you!

I watched the man walking on the moon with my infant class in my second year of teaching on the school TV. We were all so excited! I was teaching near Wimbledon at the time!

I remember playing whip and top, and jumping jacks and eating penny liquorice sticks- makes my mouth water to think of them. They just don't taste the same now! We played out in our road a lot as there were very few cars.

We walked three miles to school and thought nothing of it. If I was lucky, during the horrendous smogs before the Clean Air Act, I was given a penny for the tram.We also played out in the woods all day and no-one worried. We were so much freer in those days, but I do remember my friend being assaulted by a man in the woods, and the police being involved, so these things happened then as well.

My Dad bought one of the first TV's and it was a fancy wooden thing with a very small screen. There were no programmes late afternoon and early evening so people actually had to talk to each other and play with their children! For my 17th or 18th birthday I was given a record player and Rubber Soul, as I just loved the Beatles.

Happy birthday everyone

As an aside for Maz, I think that you can turn your Publisher file into a PDF file and upload it that way.

Yes content is obviously very very important, but that doesn't mean that the written word should be spelt incorrectly. We write things down to communicate with others, and our writing needs to be accessible to them. If someone finds spelling difficult there are spell checkers, dictionaries etc. If someone writes something wonderful, but spells it badly, then they have let themselves down as they could correct it if they wished (I’m not talking about people with specific problems such a dyslexia, or relatively new to the language) we shouldn't have to struggle to understand an excellent piece of work because the spelling is bad. The more you correct yourself the sooner the correct spelling fixes in the mind. Correct spelling really does matter to me, even though I do make mistakes myself. Incorrect spellings can cause confusion. The English language is mostly phonic based, and there are rules and patterns to spelling to make it easier. Sadly the education system went through a period where these rules were not taught, which made it very difficult for people to learn to spell correctly later on.

A common spelling system makes written language easy to understand for everyone. Consider people spelling just as they wish: different accents would produce different spellings, which might well be incomprehensible for someone from another part of the country. With some words the spelling indicates the meaning, such as hole and whole, bow and bough, too, to and two. Translating and interacting with other languages would be problematic and would affect our ability to work and trade with other nations. I'm not sure they would be too impressed with us either.

Spelling affects reading, as once we have learnt to read we don't actually break words down but read by skimming and looking at pattern, shape or the top shapes of letters. If spelling was inconsistent and everyone did their own thing it would be very confusing. It takes a lot of concentration for me to read my nieces 'text speak' emails, and this is essentially another language which needs to be learnt, but I'm not her generation so having to learn it. Call me old-fashioned

I'm not sure about what happened in Shakespeare's day or before but a lot of people were unable to read or write, and French and Latin were two of the main written languages, hence a lot of our spelling system is based on them.

Just imagine a scenario where everyone in every country decided spelling to an agreed format should go. I think communication would become impossible.

Have a wonderful day!

Hi mistymum and welcome.

As Helen says these sheets or something else like them (as as you can see they were added a long time ago) are useful for inexperienced staff, students, helpers, other teachers in a school, HT's, OFSTED etc. to have an outline at hand of what is in each area and what we hope the children are learning. They also give inexperienced staff some idea about what to talk about with the children. Members of this site are generous in sharing resources, so that does save us from reinventing the wheel sometimes. We all do things a bit differently and we adapt accordingly. These are only done once and laminated, so unless a lot of the resources change as practise develops, it isn't an onerous task.

As far as the writing area, or mark making area goes, the resources are usually always available for the children to use as they wish. Some may be added later in the year and other resources are added depending on the children's interests and what is planned from them. If the writing area is used for a focus activity, such as making cards, shopping lists, or writing letters to a story character, then enhanced resources are added for that.

Er actually my Mmmm was because I was having trouble uploading more than one file at a time and I thought my IT skills were lacking

I'd like to add my welcome too. You seem to be doing OK so far. Just take a bit of time to have a look around and don't be afraid to ask if you need anything.

I thought it was fantastic and I felt very emotional - I know there are problems- Tibet etc. but just to see all those people joining together and sharing in this experience was amazing. Surely something good was happening!

Have a great day.

Welcome catfin and Supersal. Yes Cathy Nutbrown's book is a really useful one I bought it after going on a course she did in Manchester some years ago.

I can't really add much to the excellent comments above other than to reinforce that consistency in approach is essential, high expectations for behaviour, and lots and lots of praise.

Well done Nichola you will beat me to it by a month. Remember it's 'quality not quantity' that counts. We also had lovely posts about your wedding which we all enjoyed and felt a part of.

Have a wonderful day you two

Actually these aren't my CP posters mine are the ones in the Resources on here. The ones on this thread are super, although I have seen them before but I can't remember who first added them. I am wondering if they came off the TES resource library. Anyway well done that person they are very useful