a little bit of magic...

I love getting the chance to sit down with my colleagues and talk about the what ifs, the what mays and the what coulds...

Ellen and I sat for almost 3 hours talking about the possibilities of this term based on our knowledge of the children... their interests and their needs from us and each other... and also to connect with our development areas as teachers this year...

Reflection and critical thinking about norms...

We have been looking at the structure of the week... how can we create more time for reflection, meaningful reflection, for the children, where they can see the purpose of this reflection... to really get them involved in thinking about what they have been doing  in order to work out how we will progress... that we do our reflection WITH the children MUCH more.

We now will have our reflection time together on Fridays instead of Mondays, where we, as teachers, can reflect on the week that has just been, looking at the needs of the children... later in the morning we will have a reflection time with the children where we use photos of the week to stimulate reflection on what we have learned and then plan together how we should continue the following week... of course some of the activities will come from us the teachers using our knowledge of the children to stimulate and challenge their play and to support their social, emotional and cognitive growth - but we really want the children to think up activities too... not just random things that they like but based on their reflections... Mondays are going to be children's "choice" day... where we can be in up to three groups - it also gives us the weekend to work out logistics if we need to. It feels very exciting... the children have challenged out power and that adults make so many decisions, we are certainly not going to relinquish our power of keeping them safe, but we are handing over more power of the content... but really that is wrongly phrased... because the children have always had that power, they have just not been aware of it... so I think what we are doing is making their power more VISIBLE.

All this talk of power is rather apt... as fairies and magic powers is where we are starting the year... re-asking a few of the questions we asked last year to see how the children are thinking now as we start the project... but we are digging deeper and the project is going to be less about what are fairies and more about using fairies and magic powers to explore themes such as rules, power, friendship etc...

This week has all been about coming together again... we are finally a full group, except for one of our poor friends who has broken our foot (we visited today to leave a feel better book we made) - next week we will start our magical explorations... the magical play has already got going...

fairy painting...