Supporting each Child’s Development

A partnership between the Key person, child and home.

At Willow Cottage, we recognise that each child’s home life and relationship with their primary carers has the biggest impact on their development.

With this in mind, we are keen to encourage you to share with us via eyLog things that happen away from Nursery so that we can use this information to support your child.

Over the last six months, we have developed the way that we use eyLog based on feedback from parents, staff and children and are now rolling out the changes across all three settings.

What does this mean for families and the children?

  • You will have observations published more regularly and with fewer email notifications!
  • The information from observations is fed into the planning in a more timely fashion therefore making them more effective for individual children.
  • The children are more involved in their own learning.
  • There is more time for the practitioners to spend with the children.

What does this change look like?

You will now receive a weekly observation update for your child. Each week the type of observation is different over a 4 weekly cycle, to include:

  • A focused observation. A observation taken by the practitioner watching a child for 10mins and recording close details. This observation can show us levels of concentration, how a child chooses and moves between available activities and resources and aspects of their interactions with peers and adults.
  • A planned rolling observation, gives an overview of the week’s snippets that show the learning moments. This week the child is one of the focus children for the week, with planned activities and resources are tailored specifically to support the focus children and all staff in the team will have their next steps in mind when engaging in play with them.
  • A rolling observation giving an overview of the week with snippets that show learning moments.
  • Reflection observation – In this week the Key Person and child will reflect on the past month to think about what has been enjoyed, specific interests, learning and characteristics of learning (e.g perseverance, problem solving). With our older children, the reflection will involve the Key Person sharing with the child, looking at their Learning journey photos on the tablet and any pictures/creations from the month; for some of the younger children this may be used as a further opportunity to bond and play! In this week, your Key Person will also include some “homework” for you! This might be asking if you have seen your child do something specific, or recommend things that you might try at home to support the next step. We would encourage you to respond in the comments box.

If you have any further questions, comments or suggestion please do speak to or email your Setting Manager.