I had my EYFS training today run by Surrey County Council.
I have to say that I quite enjoyed myself......I like to get the opportunity to meet up with some of my other childminding friends....you do tend to see the same faces on these courses....don't we Mary (mjw)?
As I do give up my valuable time I do try to make the best of any course that I go on and try to enjoy it instead of being resentful of having to be there.
Anyway s I said we had a good day today. It was split into 3 different workshops -
Letters & Sounds (about nursery rhymes and rhyming words etc)
Development (How children develope and how to use the Practice Guidence)
Observations (How & what is expected of you)
Although I did feel that some of it was a bit like teaching grandma to suck eggs I could understand why they did it because obviously there are some people out there who haven't done what I have or have the experience that I have.
Up until now I haven't really looked too much at EYFS as I was due my inspection and knew that I needed to stick to the 14 standards and B23.
I have spent the last couple of days going through it all and obviously did the training today.
I have come away in a very positive frame of mind and feel very confident that I will be able to implement EYFS fairly easily as it just means that I have to tweak a few things here and there as I have already been doing most of the stuff for the last couple of years under B23.
I actually think that EYFS is easier than B23 was as it gives more examples of how to implement.
Most of what they are asking you to do you should already be doing anyway the only difference is that it will be statutory to record the observations.
Yes it does mean extra paperwork for those who has never recorded them before or keep a development file on the children.
If a child is with you on a full time basis but you are only expected to do 2-3 very small observations each child in a week....if the child is only with you for a couple of days you will probably only have to do 1-2 observations.
The idea of sticky labels was given as an example which I actually thought was a very good idea. If you imagine the size of a sticky label then there isn't really mountains that you have to write.
In the example you had a clipboard with a sheet of 6 labels for each child.... One for each developmental area.
Personal social & Emotional development (PSED)
Communication Language & Literacy (CLL)
Problem Solving, Reasoning & Numeracy (PSRD)
Knowledge & understanding of the world (KUW)
Physical development (PD)
Creative Development (CD)
The idea is that you complete your short observation and when you can (maybe at the end of the week) you transfer the label to the individual records.
From these observations you could assess what the next step would be and how the child can develop further. You do not have to do this for every observation you make just a few.
If you wanted to you could then plan what you would do to help the child achieve the next step which will help with your monthly planning. Again you do not need to do this for every observation.
As I said I am in a much more positive frame of mind and am happy to start implementing EYFS in the next couple of weeks.
What was also nice is that we had a really nice goodie bag at the end full of really good resources.
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