Childcare Blog

Childcare Blog Assignment- 22.01.13

I am currently studying at James Watt College learning about childcare, I am in college Monday and Tuesday and my placement days are Thursday and Friday. Throughout the year I spend all of my time based in the same place, this means that I can get to know all of the children well and develop good relationships with them. My placement is in The Enchanted Forest nursery which is a private nursery located in the Erskine hospital grounds in Erskine.

In this nursery there is around 50 children aged from 8 weeks- 5 years old, they are grouped in to three rooms... A 'babies' room where there is children from aged 0-2, a '2's' room which is aged 2-3 and the '3-5s'. The children get moved through the rooms depending on their age and also the development of there essential skills e.g. language, social, physical and cognitive. Each room focuses on developing the children differently but with a ratio of one staff member to eight children that can be quite difficult and throughout the day everything that the children take part in has to support the curriculum for excellence.

I am based with the 3-5 year old children so my role is to plan activities for the children to take part in. I do this weekly and base my activity around a different topic each time. For example, so far I have planned activities to develop their creativity, science, english, social skills and maths, but my favourite thing to do with the children is music activities as you can do singing activities including actions, instruments and also everyone can take part. I help them develop their play experiences, for example if they are all based in one area of the nursery and it is becoming chaotic I will ask if some of them want to choose a book for me to read, or a game that we can play, that way it will motivate them to go and do something else.

In the Enchanted Forest Nursery we do not have many issues with the children that we need to deal with, most of the time they play together nicely, we encourage them to use their 'kind hands' and their 'listening ears' and treat the other children the way that they would like to be treated. Though if an incident does occur we would take the children a side, speak to them calmly to find out what the trouble is and try to defuse it as quickly as possible.

Hopefully this year will allow me to further my experiences when working with children, I have already learned so much about how to act around the children, how to treat different situations and also what being part of a nursery situation is actually like. This will help immensely in my future career in primary teaching, although the children are a lot older in primary schools I am sure the tasks I have to tackle and the things I am asked to do will be very similar.