During this week I have been thinking about resources for my nurture work, thinking about the individual needs and interests of the different children.I have also been writing training and organising photos to go into my book- Promoting young children’s health and well-being, which will be published soon by Jessica Kingsley publishers. The thread in all of these activities is giving careful thought about the resources we offer to children and how we can make them look inviting.
I believe if we want children to get pleasure from the activity, if we want children to learn to value and look after resources and if we want children to have the opportunity to create beautiful things then we need to offer them resources which look attractive, beautiful and inviting.
I love it when I see creative areas in classrooms and nurseries which look inviting and attractive. In Reggio Emilia ( a town in North Italy who are have developed a creative pedagogy) they give a lot of thought to the resources they offer, how they look, how they feel etc. I visited Reggio over ten years ago and took away with me the idea of presenting materials and resources to children in a beautiful way.
During this last week, I have been developing a new resource, inspired by Reggio practice, it is a resource tray of small parts. I will be using this in training I am delivering, I also plan to use it as one of the photos in my book. I have made a smaller version that I will be using in my nurture work. The idea of a small parts tray is to offer resources that children can use in their creative making.The aim is that it looks interesting, tactile, inviting and will encourage children to extend their creative activities.
Photo of small parts tray taken by Iain Cotton
Seeing the world through the eyes of children 