Early relationships are fundamental
for a child’s wellbeing, cognitive development and learning.
As a practitioner, it’s crucial that you build trusting relationships
with both children and their families,
so that children feel safe and you understand their needs.
You also need to ensure that stretches and systems are in place
to allow relationships within your early years setting to thrive.
This includes, encouraging children to build relationships and resolve conflicts.
So, within relationships, obviously there are moments where
there is a to and fro process and there is a co-operation.
So, can we just spend some time thinking about what that looks like in practice?
I’m a bit more used to working with quite a range of different ages,
there is sort of clashes within group activities and co-operating.
I quite often find the older children will be sat playing
with maybe like a small world thing and they will be building up this little story,
and one of the younger children will see this and want to come and join in
or hear the language from the other child and be like,
“I’m really…this is what I’m interested in too.”
Because they don’t necessarily have the language to interact with them,
they struggle to do that and will just take a toy and try and join in
and the older child might not see exactly what’s going on
and I will sit with them and say to them,
“You know, she just wants to come and play with you,"
“shall we play together? Shall we share your toys?”
And try to encourage them to interact with different ages
regardless of the language barrier.
As part of thinking about relationships,
I think it’s really important to think about the relationships
children foster with each other.
Can you think of times in your environments where there’s those opportunities
for children to be independent alongside each other?
One of the first things that comes to my head,
because it will be a moment that I will probably never forget,
was when there was a child that was not very physically able,
so in a wheelchair and needed lots of adult support,
so then very hard to be independently playing.
She wasn’t able to move herself to any activities or resources
that she wanted to independently. So, we had to really tune in to those.
However, it wasn’t just us that tuned in to those
and there was another specific child that became so interested in her
and really did tune in to what she was interested in.
So, one day, we did not leave the setting at all, but kind of stepped back
and instantly the child was aware that there wasn’t an adult there with her,
and came over, engaged, instigated a game of peek-a-boo on the baby gym
and it was just amazing to watch that actually,
that although we thought we’d learnt so much about this child so did this child.
she absolutely knew what she wanted,
the games of anticipation and what’s going to happen next.
She knew that that was her interest
She really engaged and together, even without any language,
we’re able to communicate really well and it was lovely to see.
And I think just showed the importance even if children aren’t
able to physically be independent,
that actually we need to think about ways we can make that happen
because there will be moments that we miss.
A beautiful expression of companionable learning as well in terms of
just being attuned together and really that sense of letting go and having fun.
It is important to invest the time to form relationships
with the children and their families,
so that the children feel secure and safe in the environment.
After forging secure relationships,
children feel able to independently access the environment
which supports them to develop relationships with other children and adults.
Practitioners should feel supported to reflect on their pedagogy
to enable children to take risks in the environment
and resolve conflict independently.
Practitioners should be supported to tolerate
the uncertainty and uncomfortable feelings evoked within them
when children are taking managed risks.