Guest Authors

Imagine the scene – it’s Christmas eve and you realise with horror that you have no cranberry sauce. Without it, Great Aunt Jenny would spend tomorrow complaining and so you pop out to the overcrowded supermarket in a panic to pick some up. As...

It’s great watching children get deeply involved in their play. However, problems can occur when it is time for children to stop what they are doing and change activity or task. For some children, moving around causes a lot of stress and...

Do you have a multisensory room in your setting? Have you ever considered getting one, or setting up a small multisensory environment? Since their inception in the late 1970s, multisensory rooms have proliferated at a staggering rate. Recently...

It’s 2006 and I have a new baby. I love music, so I look for a local baby music group. I’m not even sure what to look for, and as a new mum, I cannot find a central directory of services. Finally, I google the right keywords to find a local...

Everything a child consistently hears, sees and feels creates belief systems that then silently influence them throughout life. Early childhood experiences mould how we view ourselves and the world around us. If a child consistently doesn’t feel...

Be presentIn this fast-paced world, it can be very easy to get distracted. We all have a million things on our to-do lists at any given moment and it can mean that we rarely stand still. It’s important for children to feel heard and valued, and...

What comes to mind when we use the term curriculum? A framework or document that supports our practice; The EYFS or a programme of study or educational scheme? Is it subjects like maths and English or perhaps areas of learning and development; a...

This month I thought we could take a slight detour on the skills and benefits to improve little one’s musical experience and use it all to have a little fun! During my years of delivering music in different venues, some groups have preferred a...

In my last article, I did a little myth busting around the phenomena that is multisensory rooms. Our understanding of the benefits of multisensory rooms is very skewed by the influence of advertising, many an unverified promise is made about the...

Have you ever noticed a child in your setting that is capable of doing tasks but takes a lot longer than others, or a child that you have said something to and they respond to it a few minutes later? It may be that this child needs extra...

It’s 2006 and I have a new baby. I love music, so I look for a local baby music group. I’m not even sure what to look for, and as a new mum, I cannot find a central directory of services. Finally, I google the right keywords to find a local...

Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn around,Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground… At first, we might think that every child and every adult who grew up speaking English as their first language will know this adorable nursery rhyme. The tune is...

As you will already know, mark-making is one of the earliest stages of writing. If children are to become confident writers, they need to partake in as many mark-making activities as possible, at as early an age as possible. When mark-making,...

So many places have multisensory rooms, perhaps you have one? Recently we have seen football stadiums, airports and even shopping centres installing multisensory rooms. The DfE (2015) require all special schools to have a multisensory room in...

The 11th – 15th November might be Anti-Bullying Week but there’s never a wrong time to talk about bullying or to find ways to deal with it. Stories are a versatile and powerful way of helping children (and all of us come to that) learn. It was...

Since the revised Education Inspection Framework was first published, the words ‘cultural capital’ have become the new buzz words in education and within early childhood, but what do they really mean and do we need to do anything differently...

As a society we place importance on words such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Of course, we want to raise polite children and it is important to teach them good manners, but should we force them to use these words? I think it’s important to hold...

It’s 2006 and I have a new baby. I love music, so I look for a local baby music group. I’m not even sure what to look for, and as a new mum, I cannot find a central directory of services. Finally, I google the right keywords to find a local...

As the weather gets cooler and the evenings draw in, we are reminded that it’s no longer summer. In the UK, we have four seasons, each with a very different climate. Of all the different times of the year, I think autumn is my favourite, not...

All young children display extreme emotion from time to time. If you have a child in your setting that is repeatedly displaying angry behaviour, then it can be particularly scary, disruptive and stressful; both for that child and the other...

I wrote about the Wonders of a Sensory Story back in 2018 for Parenta and expressed in that article just how hard it is to even consider trying to articulate how fabulous sensory stories are in a single article. When I first encountered them,...

We all want to instil positive values and behaviour in children. However, it’s important to remember that they are just little people trying to navigate a sometimes, unfamiliar world and we should not expect a level of perfection that we as...

How Forest and Beach School activities can help to combat Nature-Deficit Disorder As I write this article, my children are looking at how we should fill the last few days of their school summer holidays. Many of the local activities available...

Until the age of three, children view a ‘friend’ as whoever they happen to be playing with at the time. However, after that, youngsters start to seek out the company of playmates they play particularly well with. When social scientists looked at...

It’s 2006 and I have a new baby. I love music, so I look for a local baby music group. I’m not even sure what to look for, and as a new mum, I cannot find a central directory of services. Finally, I Google the right keywords to find a local...

Emotions are often very extreme in young children. We’ve all seen the dramatic responses that children can have to the most simple of things. It can be extremely exhausting and trying when a young child shows a very extreme reaction to something...

In honour of National Doodle Day, I decided to write an article about doodling and the importance of it for children. Although it looks like scribbling, doodling is so much more than that. Here are some of the benefits for children in their...

Much of my work focuses on children who face significant barriers to their learning, many of these children have profound and multiple learning disabilities or complex autism and are non-verbal communicators. The senses are everything to me when...

“What is the most important musical thing I can teach my baby/toddler/pre-schooler?” This is the most common question that most parents attending early music sessions ask. And the most common answer is, teach your child to love music. But...

Inclusion in early years settings and schools is something that is widely discussed thanks to its advantages and disadvantages. Despite any disadvantages, one major bonus of inclusion is the opportunity for children to mix with other children...