About Early Vision
OAK HOUSE NURSERY SCHOOL
In 1987, with a love of young children and four little ones of my own, I opened a nursery school within our family home. Thanks to a supportive long-suffering family and wonderfully committed staff, the nursery has flourished with a pupil roll over one hundred.
LEARNING THROUGH PLAY
We, like everyone working in the early years sector, value and believe in helping our young children to “learn about the world through their play” so we provide heaps of different activities for our children to enjoy. We also like to vary our “Role Play Areas”, introducing new environments to broaden the children's learning and play experience. Children are always keen to investigate all the ‘new' resources and to take on new ‘roles' from the scenario. However, often the children have no first-hand experience of a ‘real-life' location and so are taking on roles that they have not seen modelled by the adults in the environment.
WHY EARLY VISION?
Because we have struggled over the years to adequately introduce children to ‘new' scenarios that truly inform and enlighten them about that little pocket of the real world. Books and pictures, stories and puzzles have static images of different role models, however many of them bear little resemblance to reality! Outings and visits are valuable but difficult to organise and not always accessible to groups of young children!
TRUE EXAMPLES OF REAL LIFE PLACES
So often have we wanted to find a way to show the children a real example of our new ‘role-play scenario' so they could see the environment, see what happens and what the adults there do, wear and say. They would then have such a deeper understanding, that it would inspire their imagination, underpin their role-play and inform their learning.
We just wanted to “bring the real world into our setting”.
That is how the idea of Early Vision was born.
As Practitioners we are then left with the dilemma of either limiting our role-play areas to the ones our children are familiar with, or introducing exciting ‘new' ones with undoubted learning potential, but which are beyond many of their personal experiences. Neither, I felt, were solutions to the problem.
MISREPRESENTATIONS IN THE MEDIA
Sadly our children face ‘representations' in the media that are simply wrong. On TV some children witness ‘role-models' such as Police Officers, Doctors and Shop Keepers behaving in a manner and using vocabulary that we, as Early Years Practitioners, would not wish our children to replicate in their play.
OAK HOUSE NURSERY SCHOOL
In 1987, with a love of young children and four little ones of my own, I opened a nursery school within our family home. Thanks to a supportive long-suffering family and wonderfully committed staff, the nursery has flourished with a pupil roll over one hundred.
LEARNING THROUGH PLAY
We, like everyone working in the early years sector, value and believe in helping our young children to “learn about the world through their play” so we provide heaps of different activities for our children to enjoy. We also like to vary our “Role Play Areas”, introducing new environments to broaden the children's learning and play experience. Children are always keen to investigate all the ‘new' resources and to take on new ‘roles' from the scenario. However, often the children have no first-hand experience of a ‘real-life' location and so are taking on roles that they have not seen modelled by the adults in the environment.
WHY EARLY VISION?
Because we have struggled over the years to adequately introduce children to ‘new' scenarios that truly inform and enlighten them about that little pocket of the real world. Books and pictures, stories and puzzles have static images of different role models, however many of them bear little resemblance to reality! Outings and visits are valuable but difficult to organise and not always accessible to groups of young children!
TRUE EXAMPLES OF REAL LIFE PLACES
So often have we wanted to find a way to show the children a real example of our new ‘role-play scenario' so they could see the environment, see what happens and what the adults there do, wear and say. They would then have such a deeper understanding, that it would inspire their imagination, underpin their role-play and inform their learning.
We just wanted to “bring the real world into our setting”.
That is how the idea of Early Vision was born.
As Practitioners we are then left with the dilemma of either limiting our role-play areas to the ones our children are familiar with, or introducing exciting ‘new' ones with undoubted learning potential, but which are beyond many of their personal experiences. Neither, I felt, were solutions to the problem.
MISREPRESENTATIONS IN THE MEDIA
Sadly our children face ‘representations' in the media that are simply wrong. On TV some children witness ‘role-models' such as Police Officers, Doctors and Shop Keepers behaving in a manner and using vocabulary that we, as Early Years Practitioners, would not wish our children to replicate in their play.