One common misconception that irritates me to distraction is that Early Years teachers just “play all day”. The phrases “but you don’t have as much planning to do”, “but you don’t have to prepare for SATS” and “it must be so much easier than Key Stage 1 and 2 because you have no marking” fill me with rage. Just ask my husband or children, they have all made the mistake of setting me on this course of ranting in the past.
What upsets and enrages me even more is when these comments come from other educators, educators of older children. Early Years is tough. We are on our feet all day, we have to have eyes in the back of our heads and we do it for the love. We create all of our resources from scratch and do it daily. We redo our learning areas every half term or even more regularly. We deal with children who can’t speak or who are struggling with toilet training and they are all complicated little humans who are only just learning how to be in the world without their parents around. WE WORK HARD! We have just as much planning and assessment, if not more because we cannot assess in ability groups because the children are not yet norming and conforming to detestable Higher/Middle/Lower pigeon holes we are so desperate to place them in. Saying that though… we do have a wonderful time and the fulfilment and enjoyment we get from both the age group and working with Development Matters cannot be topped. The point I am making here (and it is bordering on back tracking) is that we work just as hard as any other teacher BUT these critics are kind of right. We have the one shining benefit in our jobs that we do not have to work with the depressingly rigid and jam packed National Curriculum. There is no requirement for us to have to fit additional lessons like Design Technology, PSHE, foreign languages or music into our weekly planning. We do do all of those things, of course, but in different guises and they are already built into our Development Matters framework. The benefit we have is that our Early Years framework is based on child development and so affords us a lot of flexibility in how we deliver learning. We do work just as hard as other primary teachers BUT we don’t have to cram in specific lessons in specific orders within specific time frames. What this means is that we don’t end up feeling like Philosophy for Children is ‘just another thing I need to squeeze into the day’. Instead it is something we can do as standalone lessons, as part of a topic based lesson or weaved into our everyday learning through play.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorMiss Magical Mess is a pre-school teacher and P4C Level 2B facilitator. After a shaky start as a P4C facilitator (P4C with 3 year olds... are you kidding?) Miss Magical Mess created her own approach to P4C and enquiry model and is now a big fan. Archives |