Sightlines South East Network: How to Join

Please contact Hayley Peacock at Little Barn Owls Nursery:

Little Barn Owls Day Nursery and Farm School,
Global House
Moat House Farm
Rusper Rd
Horsham
RH124QR
01403 254413
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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The Secrets of Materials

Sightlines South East Network - Action Research Project
October 2014

Project Background
The idea for this project was born from a desire to create a context for educators with shared values for creative and reflective practice to engage in professional dialogue with one another - to create a researching, learning and work sharing context for dedicated educators from participating nurseries and schools from the South East of England.

Aims
The aims of this action research project are:
to develop the practice of reflection and exchange, both within our own settings and between settings
to strengthen relationships between professionals with shared values in the South East
to learn more about how we can support children's learning through use of open-ended materials

Participants 
Thames Tiddlers Nursery 
Little Jungle Nursery
High House Nursery
Southwater Infants Academy
Little Barn Owls Nursery & Farm School

Project Timeline
1. 4th October Meeting
Key educators from the five participating settings will attend a creative workshop in preparation for the project, on Saturday 4th October 2014.

2. Gathering Materials
Back in their settings, educators will propose the idea of creating a materials 'pod' to the children they work with to give to another group of children. Over a four week period educators work with children to create a 'pod' of open ended materials that are in some way in relationship with each other for creative exploration and investigation. Please aim to have gathered your materials by the end of October.

3. Exchanging pods
We will arrange which settings will exchange with one another, and discuss the practicalities, at the 4th October meeting, and will aim to swap materials during the first week of November.

4. Working with the materials and children's ideas
Over the rest of the autumn and spring term the children and educators will have the opportunity to work with the materials in their settings, and the ideas which spring from these encounters. The educators can document children's encounters, enquiries and exchanges of and between children that the materials in the pods provoke, as well as the 'expressions' of creative work the children carry out (ie the things they make, do, test, imagine with and compose with the materials). This researching of children as they research both the materials and their creative competencies aims to reveal the 'secrets of the materials', hence the name of the project.
The ideas which come out of the work with the materials may lead on to deeper explorations of new ideas and proposals in the groups.

5. Sharing our learning and the children's learning: during and after the project
We look forward to sharing our learning and the children's learning with one another and more widely as the project continues...

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Sightlines South East Network: Key Participants

Sightlines South East Network is founded by Hayley Peacock, Director of Little Barn Owls Nursery in Horsham, and is run by a steering group made up of representatives from Sightlines Initiative and members of the South East Network.

Little Barn Owls Nursery & Farm School is a private day nursery working with an enquiry based learning approach, whom at their core believes education is the life-long process of learning to live well. The pedagogy of the educating team is continually developed through drawing inspiration from Reggio Emilia and enquiry based learning from around the world. The nursery operates a farm school and forest school programme as part of their commitment to providing an enabling, creative indoor and outdoor learning context. The nursery employs an Atelierista and three Pedagogical Coordinators who work with children and adults to facilitate long term projects with children that value and make visible the process of learning and expressing together.

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Sightlines South East Network Vision and Values

Here are some thoughts of members of the network on their values, as recorded at the network meeting on 4th October 2014:

Here are the values of the network as written in the Network Charter (October 2014):

We see children as rich in curiosity, competence and potential. They are innately sociable and seek exchanges. Their desire and predisposition to be curious, to enquire, to hypothesise, to be in relationship with others and to interpret and make sense of their experiences are basic human characteristics. Children are born with the qualities of curiosity, engagement, joy, exchange, wonder, and the ability to make and share understandings. It is their right to expect that these intrinsically human qualities will be recognised, respected and nurtured by adults, who are now empowered to act as their guardians and who frame their worlds. Children are makers of meaning and culture, and not simply the subjects of received information.

We see education as the creative process of exchange and relationship with the world, ourselves, and others. The task of educators is to support and encourage children's exploration and understanding. The acquisition of skills is not in itself an aim of education. Skills grow in the course of children's engagement in their learning, their relationships and their meaning-making.We see educational settings as places of research and innovation, where culture is created, not merely transmitted. This implies the active and continuous formation of vibrant, vivacious and sociable learning places and spaces which have our core values at their heart, clearly expressed in our pedagogical approaches.

Our educational work values engagement in, and imaginative exploration of, the natural world. Moving indoors, we see the school environment as a studio for the exploration and exchange of ideas, a place where children can bring all of their senses to the business of learning, and use all their expressive languages to make their learning visible.

We seek to promote the values of democracy, human rights and the 'competent child' in our work, through enabling

• a 'pedagogy of listening'BACK
• reflection and exchange amongst children and educators
• the multiple ways ('languages') in which children seek to express themselves
• action research projects in which the learning of both adults and children can be explored, developed and shared

This view of teaching and learning, of children and educators, of schools and education as a whole, owes much to Sightlines' continuing relationship with the educators of Reggio Emilia and their approach within the Municipality Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the city. We can synthesise the above with the concept of developing an 'Environment of Enquiry': in which we particularly value

• Encountering
• Enquiring
• Exchanging
• Expressing

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