Now that you're finally working in the early years, you can evaluate how successfully you are applying your professional training with this quiz set by Ilse MacLean
If you have just finished a nursery nurse or nursery teaching course and are waiting for your first real job, you will be familiar with the principles of self-evaluation of provision, using performance indicators. The Scottish Executive sets these out concisely in a nice colourful ring binder, titled The Child at the Centre. Its writers might welcome some parallel input, written from practical experience in the form of a quiz.
1. Ethos
You want to look nice for your first professional job, and have vowed to give up your stained, hole-ridden student gear for some real clothes. During week one in the world of work, however, you arrive home with two white flour handprints on your best trousers' posterior (baking scones, Monday), a red handprint on your spare trousers (painting post van, Tuesday), dried snot on your designer sweatshirt (incipient measles epidem- ic but you don't know it yet, Wednesday) and so on until, on Friday, you are forced to take stock of reality.
Do you:
a) Wear your worst clothes to nursery on Monday and confess to startled colleagues that you have always been into Grunge, and just smartened yourself up for the interview?
b) Marry money, so that you can wear your Stella McCartney and throw it away after each wearing?
c) Tie-dye all your clothes so that any new stains won't show?
2. Personal, social and emotional development
For some weeks you have been working on sharing with one little boy, J, whose concept of sharing is to snatch everything he wants regardless of previous possession. You decide to create an exercise in sharing crisps. On several days, pairs of children have been given one packet of crisps and asked to share. You have had J as your partner. On this particular day, J, for the first time, shares the crisps equally between your bowl and his, without fuss. As you smugly congratulate yourself on the success of your PSED ploy, one of the group spills her milk. When you turn back from getting a cloth, you notice J snaffling the last of the crisps from your bowl!
Do you:
a) Congratulate yourself on the way you have provided a creative and highly successful mathematical learning experience for the children?
b) Console yourself with the thought that J's moral and social development has now reached the stage of many adults, that is, to comply with society's expectations when forced, but look for scams if you won't get found out?
c) Snatch up J's bowl before he can get to it and scoff all his crisps?
3. Knowledge and understanding of the world
You have been sitting with a lovely little group of children on their first day at nursery. They are drawing pictures. One three-year old, R, shows you a kaleidoscope of coloured squiggles. Right in the middle, you think you can detect some deliberate attempts at dots. You ask R if it is raining in his picture? Shake of head. Perhaps he is planting seeds? Even more vigorous shake of head. With a pitying look, he informs you that the dots are 'www dot com, of course'.
Do you:
a) Confess that you don't earn enough to buy a computer, and that you can hardly afford the odd telephone call to your aged Mum, let alone internet access calls?
b) Ask what his Mummy and Daddy do for a living, and change your career?
c) Ask R if he knows what www stands for (that'll teach him, smarty-pants!)
4. Children's development and learning through play
The class hoodlum (yes, there's always at least one, isn't there) throws a brick into the fish tank. One of the fish looks a bit stunned, then rises to the surface and floats there, unmoved and unmoving.
Do you:
a) Faint because you can't stand the sight of fish dying?
b) Quickly gather the nearest children around the tank and ask them if they know what the fish is doing, thereby using the incident as an impromptu science experience. (Observe, support and extend - remember your three buzzwords from college?)
c) Feel glad that this time the brick wasn't coming your way?
Well, how did you get on? Check your answers below:
a) If you scored mainly As, give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back for surviving your first weeks with a degree of self-preservation and aplomb intact.
b) Mainly Bs, give yourself a pat on the back for surviving your first weeks with your native cunning and wit still intact.
c) Mainly Cs, give yourself a pat on the back for being a born survivor. Happy probationer year!
