In this strange time when young children have never spent more of their waking hours at home, the home learning environment has never been more important. But what is it, and what should it look like? The term “home learning environment” (HLE) might conjure up an image of a child sitting at a table or …
Continue reading The importance of the home learning environment
This week we’ve been reading about a petition that is gaining traction at change.org, having originally started back in 2016. Elaine Bennett, co-founder of grassroots organisation Keeping Early Years Unique, is petitioning to extend the Early Years Foundation Stage so that it covers children from birth to seven years old. Currently the EYFS is the …
Continue reading Extending the early years curriculum to seven years old
This week’s blog post has been written by Tasha-Ro Granger, a Year 3 Early Childhood Studies student. She’s focussing on how pretend play can support children’s language development. ‘Play’. A concept that flips the well known saying “easier said than done” on its head! Play is one of those words that baffles people when asked …
Continue reading From novice talker to human dictionary: pretend play’s role in vocabulary.
You may have seen, or want to see, the 2019 comedy-drama film JoJo Rabbit, about a Hitler Youth member who has an imaginary friend in the form of Adolf Hitler. It was nominated for a raft of awards in the 2020 awards season and won a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay. This week’s blog post is …
Welcome back to the start of the new academic year; we hope you had a lovely summer and managed to have a little rest and recuperation time. One positive about taking a little time out, is that it gives you chance to put your brain in a different gear and reflect on life in a …
Continue reading Summer’s over: How are children socialised to keep themselves safe?
We are starting off with an apology this week; our regular readers will have noticed that we have missed a few posts recently. Mostly this is because life has caught up with us and we are furiously focused on meeting the deadline for our next book Understanding Gender and Early Childhood: An introduction to the …
Contemplating Childhoods 