Tabitha
Children don’t read the lesson plan
We all know that a variety of opportunities for free play is what works best in an early years setting, but how much of that unstructured play do you expect to be played in a certain way? Setting up a doll’s house with some small world play, you’d perhaps expect them to recreate scenes they see at home, but what if that playhouse was actually an alien planet overtaken by a brand new zebra species? Children don’t come to play to meet our expectations. They come to make sense of their world.
Children with SEND have a world they need to make sense of - it’s just not your world, and you will never make sense of it for them. For many children with SEND, the barriers to play aren’t a lack of imagination or willingness, they’re sensory, communication or environmental barriers that adults have the opportunity to remove. Their experiences, sensory processing and ways of understanding may not mirror your own. Rather than expecting children to experience play in the way we would, our role is to create environments flexible enough for them to explore, communicate and learn in the way that works for them.
Learning begins with feeling safe
A safe environment, paired with open-minded practitioners, creates the conditions for a child’s nervous system to shift away from protection and towards curiosity, exploration and learning. Play isn’t just something children do when they’ve finished learning. Play is one of the primary ways children learn. But meaningful play can only happen when a child’s nervous system feels safe enough to become curious.
At Goodysphere, we see evidence of this every single day: we see children arrive overwhelmed, uncertain or on the brink of meltdown, exploring with no expectations and complete freedom, and they often show us possibilities we would never have considered ourselves. They design
new dens we’ve never seen, they contort their bodies in unusual ways to understand how they exist in the space, or demonstrate interoception (understanding their body’s signals) in a way that parents describe as “remarkable”.
Some children just sit, they read, or they quietly observe others before joining in. None of these responses are wrong. They’re simply a display of children doing exactly what play is supposed to allow them to do, making sense of their world.
When we stop asking how to adapt children to our environment and start asking how to remove barriers before they arrive, everything else begins to fall into place. We stop creating separate activities for children with SEND and start creating better learning environments for everyone.
About Tabitha
Tabitha Goodison is a qualified teacher (QTS) and co-founder of Goodysphere, a multi-award- winning mobile sensory service that brings inclusive sensory environments to schools, nurseries and community events across the UK. Drawing on her background in education, safeguarding and SEND, she is passionate about removing barriers to play so every child has the opportunity to learn, explore and belong.
Visit
goodysphere.com to find out more about the fantastic work the team do and their sensory bus service for schools and nurseries.
Shop Little Learners products and more at
ypo.co.uk/earlyyears
23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
