Reflecting on Childcare Expo Midlands by Jo Baranek

7th October 2016

For those of you who were lucky enough to attend Childcare Expo at the weekend, I hope you have found time to reflect on the time you spent there. If you were like me and made the most of the free interactive workshops I hope you gained as much from them as I did.

I don’t often get time to attend workshops myself as I am normally delivering them, so when I do have the opportunity I make the most of them. This weekend I was lucky enough to sit in on a workshop delivered by Robin Sheehan who refreshed my knowledge on the benefits of outdoor play. Not just on physical being, but also the wellbeing of the children.

It is always good to spend time tending to our own learning needs and building up our own neural pathways, this is how we can support children to do the same. However, if we do not reflect on what we have heard and seen then how will we move forwards with our own practice.

In early years life moves at such a pace we rarely get time to reflect, plan and follow through. This is essential for the continuous improvement and development of our practice and if we don’t do this then the time listening to the experts is time wasted. What is the use of learning new approaches if we do not have time to implement them into our own practice for the benefit of our children? Take the time to reflect on all you have heard and decide what you would like to change or tweak in your own setting. Do this before you get back into the usual routine of your work, or you are likely to be bogged down and forget. Time always has a habit of moving too quick and before you know it, it’s been 6 months and the notes from the training are now way down the pile of paper on your desk.

So in brief… take time to reflect on all you learn from training and conferences. Do this as soon as you can to avoid it being lost in the day to day operations!