Effective Transition into Year One by Alistair Bryce-Clegg

Author:Alistair Bryce-Clegg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472949516
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

6An EYFS environment in Year One

In an ideal world, your Year One environment would be a lovely, light, open space with a variety of easy-to-access furniture and continuous provision for outdoor learning. Unfortunately, very few Year One classrooms can boast such a space. This is another added complication in trying to deliver an EYFS approach that your children will be used to in a space that isn’t set up to support you. In truth, you can only work with what you have got in terms of space and furniture while continually re-evaluating your success and stumbling blocks in an effort to help you plan a better space. But, the EYFS ethos is not just about tables and chairs.

Display

Our children spend a great deal of time in their learning environment, so we need it to be meaningful to them. There is a huge amount of precious wall space at our disposal to fill with things that are going to inspire, teach and promote self-esteem. In that respect, our wall space should be a blank canvas that belongs to each new group of Year One children who come through the door. Children are unlikely to really engage with their space if it is full of someone else’s work or an impersonal, downloaded, laminated display.

That is why, for the beginning of Year One, I would suggest that your walls are blank. They can be backed and bordered, but otherwise they are empty. True blank canvasses for the children to fill. I appreciate that for some people, the thought of doing this would be a huge leap of faith, but trust me, it is worth it in the long run. If you have display that is already up when the children come in to your setting then they will all notice it, but only a small number will really see it, and of that small number very few if any will go on seeing it and then using it to support their learning. It is not that it is magic display that can disappear, or that the children go blind! It just becomes very familiar and because they were not part of creating it and it isn’t relevant to their learning, they just don’t engage with it.

I know a lot of you may have seen your EYFS colleagues go through something of a display transformation where they no longer raid the art stock cupboard for the biggest and brightest backing paper and borders. Instead, they have begun to embrace their inner ‘beige’ – backing their boards in hessian and replacing their plastic boxes with wicker baskets.

This is not about some membership to an Early Years club, or that they are just jumping on the latest bandwagon. It is an approach based on making the environment as decodable and as motivational as possible for children. The ethos being that a neutral environment makes it easy for children to see the important things that we want them to notice and be motivated by seeing themselves and their work in action.

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