While the days are short and the nights are long, we’ve got plenty of ideas to ensure that children continue to enjoy learning and adventures outdoors. Take inspiration from this month’s outdoor calendar – with ideas on how to experience the sensory delights of darkness play – and get the conversation going around fabulous constructions, with the help of this month’s collectible poster which focuses on places of worship.
Best practice features:
- Curriculum
Develop an approach to supporting early writing by focusing on fine and gross motor skills. Teacher Claire Martin outlines practical activities which can inform your observations and shape your new curriculum. - Calling all budding sculptors! Penny Tassoni explains the developmental benefits of focusing on 3D objects in play and modelling activities, highlighting resources and ideas to fuel children’s creativity.
- Child-friendly cities: Discover how the movement for green and car-free environments is gaining momentum in the UK and Europe and how thoughtful urban planning can transform children’s lives.
- Nutrition Nordic style: This month’s health and nutrition feature investigates Finland’s approach to providing high quality school meals for all students as part of a holistic curriculum.
- Working with parents: the update on A Better Start, an ambitious ten-year programme set up by The National Lottery Community Fund and run by the National Children’s Bureau, which is using a strategy of co-production to ensure that parents, carers and communities are proactive in their local children’s services.
- All about... oral health: With the new EYFS placing emphasis on promoting oral health, we outline how to ensure children understand the importance of looking after their teeth and how this can be embedded in best practice.
- Festive book round-up: Nursery World’s pick of the best books to add a touch of literary sparkle and excitement in the run up to Christmas.
In our activity section:
U... is for children understanding the world around them, including people, places and communities in this month’s A – Z of learning; explore Georgina Durrant’s SEND activities which focus on supporting social skills for all children in your setting; containing schemes are an important part of children’s play and learning and in this month’s essential resources we suggests ways to equip it; December’s outdoor calendar has a host of ideas for enabling children to experience the dark of mid-winter and exercise all their senses at this special time of year...
Management:
- Special report on childminding
While numbers of childminders are continuing to fall, new childminding businesses are seizing opportunities and forging new business models. Is this the way forward? - Staff health and wellbeing
Covid has cast a long shadow on the health of staff wellbeing. How can managers ensure that their health and wellbeing needs are now being met? - Training
Our qualifications series concludes with a look at Level 6 and the potential for career development with a degree in early years. - Outdoor CPD:
In the last part of this series, we consider the importance of coaching and mentoring staff and asks how settings can best implement them.
News, analysis and opinion includes:
- Analysis
Catherine Gaunt unpicks the new free-entitlement funding figures unveiled by the Government in its Autumn budget and gauges how far the cash will stretch. - Opinion
Regular columnist and chief strategist at N’ Family Club, Sarah Mackenzie, asks whether it’s time for a wholesale restructure of the sector to address its systemic problems, while Fleur Anderson, MP for Putney and Roehampton, argues for plastic to be banned in all wet wipes. - Interview
Yvette Stanley, Ofsted’s national director for early years, and social care explains the thinking behind the inspectorate’s call to change the way individual settings within nursery groups are inspected.
POSTER – free with the December issue
Collect the third poster in our Construction series which features Places of Worship.