Jenny is six this summer and has made excellent progress in her Year One class at Grinling Gibbons Primary School in south London. Her teacher, Jonathan Wren, believes she has benefited a great deal from the play-rich curriculum that she experienced in her nursery and reception class and which he was able to build on during her transition to his class.
His local authority ran a series of one-day courses, starting last summer, to encourage reception and Year One teachers to work together. The training was offered across the country and supported through Government funding.
On day one, teachers looked at what elements of practice would bring about greater continuity of experience and learning for Year One children.
Follow-up training days in September and January then built on the teachers' knowledge of the children in their school and their Foundation Stage Profile.
Jonathan found it useful to share experiences and develop effective strategies with teachers from other local schools. In response, he has developed many opportunities for active, play-based learning, including role play, and has developed the use of the outdoor area. He is fortunate to have direct access from his classroom to the playground.
At the start of each day, the children are offered a choice of activities, which Jonathan has started to extend by posing small challenges - for example, offering mathematical puzzles or leaving on tables questions giving ideas for building or role-play.
Jonathan is pleased with Jenny's progress. She is a fluent user of English now and, although at the beginning of the year her phonics skills were not extensive, she is now very competent.
She likes to write, but numbers and mathematics are her particular areas of strength. She takes a mathematics game home every week and Pham, Jenny's mother, sometimes feels challenged to keep up with Jenny when they are playing together.
Jonathan has recently started a 'pop-in' session for families on Friday afternoons after school. Parents are welcome to come into the classroom, look at work and displays and have informal discussions with him about their child and the curriculum.
At home
Pham did not know anyone when she moved to south London from Cambridge in 1999. She was a cook but found that in London most cooks in restaurants were men, and she could not get work. After Jenny was born, Pham started asking in local shops about any Vietnamese groups.
The local Sure Start community outreach worker Quynh, who spoke Vietnamese, introduced her to a community centre, where she was able to make friends.
When Jenny was three years old she started in the nursery class at Clyde Sure Start children's centre. The centre offers many ways of helping families from diverse backgrounds feel valued and part of the centre.
Jenny used to tell Pham and her little sister, Kim, about her time at nursery. She loved the sunflowers in the garden and counting them. At home, she made a model of the sunflowers to show her mother how high they were growing. To share in and develop this interest, Pham now grows flowers on the balcony of their flat. Now that Kim has started in the nursery class at the school, Jenny likes to 'teach' her how to draw and write.
While Jenny was in the nursery, Pham was able to attend classes that gave her opportunities to pursue her own learning: Tai Chi, yoga and English language sessions. She hopes to take a computer course soon and is being supported in her plans to take up office work or house decorating.
At nursery
Thelma Miller, headteacher of Clyde Early Childhood Centre, writes, 'I am very pleased that Jenny has settled so well into her primary school, and I think that this was helped by the fact that her experience of settling into the nursery was a positive one.
'At nursery our admissions procedures and keyworker system ensures that every child and their parents or carers are welcomed as individuals. Here in Deptford, 85 per cent of our parents have English as an additional language and our children represent 26 different cultures. As their children start nursery many parents are finding out about the education system in this country for the first time, and so we believe that it is essential that we give families the care, time and attention that they need.
'We have an admissions day at the start of term when our new children and their parent or carer meet with their keyworker and find out about our school. We ask parents to stay with their child for four consecutive visits of an hour each visit, so children can take time to explore our rich learning environment and feel safe knowing their parent is nearby.
Sometimes we make a home visit if a child is not settling.
'I also have a special conversation with each parent at this time to find out about their child's early life, and to explain in more detail about the Foundation Stage curriculum. I asked My Tang, the Sure Start Vietnamese Community Outreach worker, to come into the nursery to interpret Pham's story for me. This helped Pham to understand what I was saying.
'Parents are interested to know how we make sure that every child is making progress in the stepping stones through our system of termly observations and photographs. This is a valuable opportunity for me to get to know our families and gain an insight into the realities of their lives. It has enabled me to feel that in spite of the pressures of my changing role as a children's centre head, I am still in touch with our families and better able to strategically shape services to meet their needs creatively and effectively.
'As we see in the video, Jenny's keyworker Frosa was able to make a relationship of trust and friendship with Jenny and her mother Pham. It took a while for Jenny to settle at nursery, but with Frosa's help, and with time and space, she became confident enough to play and explore all the wonderful things there are for children to do indoors and outside, which provide such rich language experiences.
'The garden for the three- to five-year-olds provided a magical experience for every child, and adult! Our outdoor play co-ordinator is also a creative gardener, and throughout the year children can be found doing something interesting - planting bulbs, watching the pumpkins grow to a massive size, looking with awe and wonder at the magnificent deep red tulips, harvesting a barrel of potatoes. Then, of course, we make chips!
'Most of our children live in high- rise flats and have never had the opportunity to dig in the earth, watch a wriggly worm or see the huge spiders spin their webs. Our garden is totally organic, so we attract lots of local wildlife. We have our own flock of sparrows that live in the Mile a Minute vine, nesting blue tits, and in the winter time the children make bird cakes to hang from the tree.
'Over the four terms at nursery, Jenny learned to express herself clearly in English. This was helped by the initial support of our teacher, funded through the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant, doing activities such as cooking, going to the shops, playing games and messy creative play. Every child has a daily story session with story props, big books and puppets which make group time fun.
'Children also have two small keyworker sessions a week, when it is possible to teach in a more focused way. Jenny also had the experience of looking at the photos of herself playing in the nursery during her profiling sessions. You can see Jenny and Frosa talking together in the video during one of these self-assessment sessions, and as you can see, this gave her the words to talk about her play and her growing sense of herself and others.
'At the nursery we celebrate a wide range of festivals throughout the year, which are of importance to our parents and children. They are an opportunity for all the children, staff and parents to understand something about that particular culture through music, stories, dance, food and art.
Parents enjoy making dishes to share and feel appreciated and recognised.
'We are aware that the move from nursery to "big school" is a challenge for some children and so we spend time in their last term preparing them for this move with visits to the primary school and return visits from the reception teacher to see Jenny in her nursery environment.
'Jenny took home her photographic profile which documents all her learning and achievements at nursery, and Pham tells me Jenny often looks back at this, recalling her first time at nursery with interest and pleasure.' NW Jane Cole is a Foundation Stage regional adviser
Further information
* Celebrating Young Children and those who live and work with them is available free from DfES Publications, tel: 0845 60 222 60, e-mail: dfes@ prolog.uk.com, quoting reference DfES 1211-2005 DVD
