To someone unfamiliar with early years education, it is often surprising to see the kinds of resources that are used for teaching.
Why use a collection of wooden blocks of different shapes and sizes, with some carpet tubes and an empty cardboard box to teach in the early years? Wouldn’t a more structured activity be much easier?
Open-ended and versatile, we can use block play to teach across the breadth of the pedagogical continuum, and across all seven programmes of learning. Children at different developmental stages can access the activity at the same time and we can observe their progress by how they interact and play.
In the past, early educators were required to collect ‘evidence’ to justify that learning had taken place.
It was time consuming, retrospective and often distracting. Now, there needs to be a shift in our thinking, we are considering ‘evidence’ to inform what we do, and why we do it. When you view research evidence as a ‘call to action’ it changes the way you engage with it.
