TEY-10.2

Don’t forget the importance of PLAY Continuous Provision can be a tool for supporting children’s wellbeing, says Alistair Bryce-Clegg... ALISTAIR BRYCE-CLEGG IS AN AUTHOR AND EDUCATION CONSULTANT Another key thing is to make lots of time for talk. AS MORE AND MORE children come back to settings across the country practitioners are all grappling with how to ensure every child is supported to make a positive return. For some children lockdown will have been a great experience. They will have loved being at home with their family and had the opportunity for lots of shared experiences that they might not otherwise have had. For others, their experience will have been the opposite. However, for all children lockdown has taken up a significant proportion of their life so far When children have been away from a setting for any length of time there will be a number of skills that they will have to revisit to remind themselves of what they learned and how to apply it. But, the most important focus for children’s return at any time, and especially after a long period away as a result of coronavirus, is their wellbeing. They won’t be open to engaging with the resources and experiences that you provide for them if they don’t feel comfortable with the learning space and the key adults that they will be interacting with. To help children to move on and readjust to coming back into your setting it is important for them to be able to reflect on the things that are important to them, and that might be lockdown. If we don’t give children an opportunity to process their experiences in a positive way, they will process them anyway and that might result in negative emotions and behaviours. CONTINUOUS PROVISION AND WELLBEING Continuous Provision involves providing a wide selection of open ended and specific resources for children to play and interact with that not only support the adult in their observations, scaffolding and teaching with children, but also continue the provision for learning when the adult is not there. Good Continuous Provision (CP) motivates children to get lost in a world of play and exploration. It is during these periods of self-motivation and discovery that children can process their understanding of their world and use play to make sense of it. This is a valuable process all of the time, but especially pertinent as they return to settings after lock down. CP is not just a collection of resources that the children have continuous access to. It is a plan for the environment that is based on assessment and observation. It supports your children’s current learning while also creating opportunities to take that learning forward. CP should change with your children as they rehearse, consolidate and extend their knowledge, the provision should support them to do that. EXPERIENCING THE WORLD AS A THREE-YEAR-OLD It can be hard to remember how we experienced or processed the world when we were three years old. When you have only been alive for a relatively short period of time, lots of the things that you come into contact with outside of your day-to-day routine can be unfamiliar and sometimes difficult for you to process. I often talk about imagining children’s subconscious as a filing cabinet and events that occur in their lives as the files for the cabinet. When something familiar, or similar to a previous experience, occurs it is easy for children to process and ‘file’ because they have done it before. When something very different or unfamiliar happens, like coronavirus and lockdown, then children can struggle to understand and process it. Often, they will revisit that experience (or their version of it) through their play. This helps them to normalise what they are struggling with. CONTINUOUS PROVISION AND SAFETY Of course, the safety of staff and children is paramount on our return from lockdown and the Government has produced guidance for the early years on the sort of precautions that they would advise that we take. However, CP can still be available for children to interact with, we just 52 Teachearlyyears.com