EY: Early Years Professional Development Programme review with Celine Hood, EY Practitioner

See below from Philippa Marshall, Early Years Team Lead

Celine has worked in Education for 35 years and worked in Early years at Sir John Lillie Primary school for 5 years.

She enjoyed the course as it gave her an opportunity to meet other EYE's from all over England and was able to glean and share good EYs practise.

" We could exchange similar strategies". She rediscovered the importance of play and how these can support adverse childhood experiences. She found the Action plans quite challenging as was very similar to what qualified teachers do to plan lessons but felt it was very important to be part of this process as now plans for small Communication language and listening ( CLL) intervention groups.

Within the Physical Development aspect of the course, she was able to explore the world of Block play by building upon children's CLL and imagination throughout the year using different themes such as castles to develop the children's knowledge around storytelling and different types of architecture and designs.

The maths section she especially liked, looking at how to implement cardinality and subitising which developed her own knowledge around estimation and the Characteristic of Effective learning linked with ' having a go '.

The course also offered examples of other settings directly implementing the tools as well as visually depicted in videos which Celine felt really helped her see how to use the ideas most successfully.

We also talked about how this particular Cohort ( Reception aged 4-5 year olds) of children were born in lock down and since the pandemic there is a higher proportion of children that require more time to settle into the setting when they first join as well as support around keeping the space safe but more importantly their receptive language needed far more scaffolding around expressing their emotions.