ECEC
Before a single planned experience begins, the space has already told every child what kind of day is possible. That is a professional decision, and it belongs to us.
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Before a single planned experience begins, the space has already told every child what kind of day is possible. That is a professional decision, and it belongs to us.
Walk into any early childhood room at a quarter past eight and you can read the adults in it before you meet them. Shelves at adult height say that materials are dispensed rather than chosen. A carpet square in the middle with everything facing it says that the day is organised around instruction. Trays stacked out of reach say that the mess is more feared than the exploration. None of this is written down anywhere, and yet children read it fluently within minutes of arriving. They know whether they are expected to wait or to begin. The environment is not a backdrop to our practice. It is our practice, made physical and left running all day, whether or not we are standing beside it.
This publication launches with that claim because it sits underneath everything else we intend to write about. If the room is arranged so that a child can reach what they need, carry it to where they want it, use it for longer than the adult imagined, and return it without help, then a great deal of what we call behaviour management simply does not arise. If the room is arranged for adult convenience, we spend our shift issuing corrections that the furniture made inevitable. Educators know this in their bodies. Most of us have worked in both kinds of room, and the difference in how tired we were at the end of the day was not about the children.
The habit of treating play as what happens once the learning is done gets the sequence exactly backwards.
Observation has quietly become a documentation activity, and something important was lost in the conversion.
One familiar adult who knows a child properly outperforms a room full of adults who each know them a bit.