On the first of May, Alfie’s village celebrated with a traditional Maypole. The next day Alfie’s teacher asked him to draw the Maypole. He wasn’t keen, but complied by hastily drawing a pole with ribbons: here it is

However, Alfie much prefers working with blocks. Soon with no adult suggestion Alfie and his friend Philip were at work in the construction area, where they spent nearly an hour reconstructing the Maypole experience. When his father came to take him home, Alfie explained everything in detail, from the fact that the ribbons started half-way up the pole, to the people on the benches. Alfie pointed out, "That’s our family on this bench. See, it’s only three people because you were gone that day".

Alfie’s teacher learned so much about his thinking that day. She learned that Alfie is more fluent in the language of block play than he is in the language of mark-making. She learned that he is capable of amazing perseverance, concentration and care when he is motivated from within in contrast to when he is told what to do. Finally, she learned that he understands a lot about numbers: For example realising that his family consists of four people and that one missing makes three. She also witnessed tremendous creativity, imagination, planning, co-operation, and joy in life! What more could you wish for any child?

Our design team had just developed a product to enhance Communication and Personal, Social, Emotional Development before the revised EYFS raised these areas of learning to prime area status. Early Education’s new document, Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage, suggests “Create areas in which children can sit and chat with friends, such as a snug den and cosy spaces”. That’s exactly what we were after!

Obviously, children need to feel at home before they have confidence to develop relationships and communicate. We had pondered this for some time and dreamed of  designing intimate cosy spaces where children would feel secure, relaxed and in control. The only question was “How?” After wrestling with this for several months we came up with a new line of little arches and lovely bamboo panels that can be combined in various ways to create child-size hidey-holes. These arches, curves and wave panels are compatible with Roomscapes so you can design your own nooks by building onto furniture you already have. You can also choose from an array of ready-made Cosy spaces.

Wouldn’t you have loved that kind of space as a child?

P.S. It’s not just children that love them – nurseries tell us parents respond positively to their children having a “place of their own”.

At the recent Education Show in Birmingham, a number of people who stopped by our stand mentioned that children in their settings love our Hollow blocks and use them every day in very creative ways. But another practitioner said that her children rarely use the Hollow blocks, even though they are always available. Wondering what the difference was, we discussed it further. It turned out that in her setting the children have such a wide range of toys and materials to choose from that they flit from one to another without getting deeply involved in anything. This brought to mind the old adage: that often less is more!

By defining choice as providing limitless resources, we risk distracting children from the deeply-engaged play in which the most intense communication and learning take place. The benefit of open-ended materials like Hollow blocks is that they intrinsically provide choice on their own. Children can choose whether to play alone or together, whether to use the blocks to build a big ship, construct a road, create a horse to straddle or make a cosy one-child den to sit in! Imaginative play accelerates further if a few accessories such as fabric pieces and cardboard tubes are added.

Every child is born with a drive to engage with the world around them and imagination is a big part of that drive. Imagination opens new worlds to children. It also gives them a bridge to understanding the feelings of others. So imagination is essential for children’s well-being and future. The materials we provide must support, not stifle, children's imagination.

A training pack with a PowerPoint and booklet about simple materials and open ended play is available free for trainers or advisors.

In 2011 we discontinued the Community Playthings cots and rest mats so that we could re-design them. We thought nursery owners could source them from other manufacturers while we finished off some other designs first.

However, we seem to have been wrong: Although you could source these products elsewhere, they did not have the quality you wanted. Rest mats would crack and split. Cots were wobbly and took too much space. So many of you made your voices heard that we are taking action: By the end of the summer (2012) we plan to make both rest mats and cots available once more. That gives us the time to do all the testing needed before a product, especially one for the youngest children, is released.

And, following the reintroduction of cots and rest mats, there is going to be something new:

Over the last three months, our design team has made numerous field visits to hear the sector’s ideas and wishes around children’s sleep. We learned that many of you like to take children out of cots once they are mobile – and yet you are unhappy laying a nine- or twelve-month-old baby to sleep on a mat on the floor. So we have put a lot of time and thought into a brand-new sleep product for these young children. I’m not going to describe it and I don’t know when it will be ready, so please be patient. You’re going to love it!

If you want to know when the cots and rest mats are in production send us an email with your name and phone number. We’ll make sure you’ll be the first to hear.

Whenever we bring out a new publication or training resource, we put a lot of care into the photos. A picture really is worth a thousand words. So when I was working on I made a unicorn and its accompanying PowerPoint, I asked our photographer Tricia to visit the nursery next door and see what she could capture. All the children there know Tricia and accept her presence without question. She’s good with the camera and the kids often don’t even realise she is photographing them. However, in this instance, Wanjin saw her focussing on his construction and exclaimed, “Oh! You like my jeep? I’ll show you my forklift! And my racing car! And my aeroplane!”

I love the way children’s personalities and fascinations are reflected in their play. I’ve known Wanjin all his life, and even as a baby he would make vehicle noises! As a three-year-old, he and his best friend Tommy were constructing tractors from hollow blocks. Here you see what he was doing at five. Anyone want to hazard a guess at what he’ll be doing as a teenager?

In many cultures finger games have been enjoyed by parents and young children for centuries. They can be enjoyed in nursery as well as at home. Finger games are a lot of fun for circle time. As a practitioner, I used them a lot and was sometimes surprised how seriously children took the lyrics. Once during a favourite finger game:

Up the tall white candlestick crept little Mousie Brown,
Right to the top, but he couldn’t get down.
So he called to his grandma,
Grandma! Grandma!
But grandma was in town.
So he curled himself into a ball
And ro-o-o-lled himself down.

One child’s chin began to quiver as she called ‘Grandma! Grandma!’ feeling Mousie’s distress quite personally!

Two- and three-year-olds have an impulse to experiment with words. When they create nonsense words like iggy-giggy, this is often labelled silliness. But this urge represents an important phase in language development, and we should provide constructive outlets for it. Rhythmic poetry offers one such outlet. I have had whole groups of twos and threes joining the refrain on

What does the train say, jiggle joggle, jiggle joggle,
What does the train say, jiggle joggle jee?
Will the little baby go riding with the locomo?
Lokey mokey pokey stokey smokey chokey chee!

Finger games and poems evolve into circle games engaging the whole body, like ‘I’m a little teapot short and stout’ or ‘Ring a ring o’ roses.’ Children love these. Nigerian friends introduced me to singing games from their culture, which I used in the setting as well. There are good collections of nursery rhymes and finger games to be had, as well as the Mother Goose type we all know by heart. One of my favourites is This Little Puffin, Nursery Songs and Rhymes compiled by Elizabeth Matterson (Penguin Books Ltd, 1969).

Singing and chanting games with large-motor action are a lot of fun and support children’s sense of rhythm. They strengthen friendship among the children, as well as fine-tuning their audio skills. Since circle time is intense and focused, carers need to be sensitive to children’s responses. Keep the session brief, and wind down if you feel the children getting restless. You want circle time to be something children anticipate with pleasure!

I don’t believe there is a perfect set-up for a room. Each group of children is different and room use or the age of children using a space may change. The key to laying out furniture is to allow for flexibility. Carpeted areas, however, can severely restrict the possibilities for rearranging interest areas as the room’s use changes. Let me illustrate the point. In May 2010 my colleague Suzanne and I toured eight council nurseries in the Midlands. We spoke with the manager and practitioners at each nursery trying to understand the dynamics of the rooms – what was working and what were the problems.

One problem surfaced immediately – flooring. Many of the rooms had flooring installed at the basic ratio of one third vinyl sheet goods to two thirds carpet. Even where the ratio was closer to half and half, the problem was the same. Inevitably some or all of the carpet was in the wrong place for where they wanted to locate the activity areas. Some rooms had carpet right where the children entered from the outside play area. Others had a narrow strip of sheet goods by the sinks, not wide enough to incorporate the wet/messy play that then flowed over onto the carpet. With its sound-deadening properties, carpet can certainly help the acoustic balance in a centre. But how do we decide where it should be placed when the room is being designed or refurbished?

The simplest solution is to put sheet flooring throughout the centre and use area rugs. This gives future flexibility and also lets you replace a specific rug without having a new carpet installed. It lets you use a softer, more tactile carpet in the book area which wouldn’t work in other areas. By area rugs I don’t mean the “educational” rugs that fill many catalogues. Just choose something functional that fits your décor from the local carpet store and have them edge-bind a piece the size you want.

For more information about room layout download our free booklet Spaces: Room layout for 0–5 year olds.

A child’s imagination is stronger than ours. Where we see a pile of blocks, they see a dream castle. Role play equipment is no different. While the kitchen is an important part of role play, PlayWorks is much more than another kitchen set. We asked Amy to put it through its paces for you because her imagination is certainly in full bloom!

It could be a kitchen or maybe a doctor's surgery.

Better yet a hairdresser’s or an office.

Entertainment time with a puppet show.

At the end of the day back home – and don’t forget to water the plants!

The PlayWorks Sussex set was used for all these configurations. We sprinkled PlayWorks with fairy dust so they transmogrify into almost anything you wish. Your role play area will never be the same.

My brother and I used to spend hours creating miniature worlds with whatever we could find. We’d take Mum’s plants off the window ledge to make a forest and act out various scenarios with little figures. I could really relate to Stevenson’s poem “The land of counterpane”! Later as a mother I watched my own children do the same. I wish now that I had recorded their conversations as they played. Sometimes they acted out stories they had heard and sometimes they made up their own. I have witnessed similar small world play in schools and nurseries, both indoors and out. It intrigues me – why do children seem universally drawn to such play?

Perhaps part of the answer is that in small world play, as in role play, children can re-live experiences and come to grips with whatever life is bringing their way.

Perhaps another part of the answer is that when children create these miniature worlds, they are the big people! That has all kinds of ramifications.

Yet another aspect is that in such play, as in fairy tales, imagination is the guide. I believe children’s imagination is one of their greatest strengths. I was thrilled to learn that Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge: “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.”

For more on small world play with blocks, watch the Foundations training video.

Everyone understands that automobile design is a complex process with teams working for years to perfect each part. However I often get raised eyebrows when I tell people that it took three people two months to design our Pushcart. After all, it’s got four wheels and a handle. A week to design they would guess. Why two months?

Early years catalogues are full of little pink prams, plastic wheelbarrows, baby walkers and wagons. Each serves a specific function and not much else. Our challenge was to create one piece of equipment that would serve children from one-year-olds taking their first steps to rambunctious three-year-olds moving a pile of blocks from the construction corner to the role play area.

I will only touch on one aspect of the design.The Pushcart does not have swivelling castors at the front to make it easy to steer like a shopping cart. That might work for a two- or three-year-old, but when a one-year-old wants to use the Pushcart she crawls over and pulls herself up on the sides of the cart. Then her hands ‘walk’ up the handle. If there were castors on the front, the Pushcart would swivel sideways and the child would end up face-down on the floor. On the other hand, an older child needs to steer the cart. The team used anthropometric charts and observed children to figure out the balance of height and weight so that an older child could press down on the handle to steer it while the beginning walker would not tip it. The final Pushcart design looks simple, but there's much more to it than meets the eye.

About ten or twelve years ago, an early years advisor told me there was a strong connection between block play and literacy. That seemed a little far-fetched. The only connection I could see was that both writing and block play require good hand-eye coordination and a certain amount of manual dexterity. However I began observing block play more closely. I noticed that children’s block play is often inspired by stories they have heard. A teacher in our local school observed: “I just told my Year Two class a fairy tale about a princess, knights and a dragon; now they are busy in the construction area building castles, knights and dragons.” After this, I started seeing numerous instances where children would go to the construction area after hearing a story and re-enact it with blocks.

My next realisation was really exciting. Writing is much more than a physical act of making marks on paper. Writing is a symbolic act! Whether someone is writing in English or Chinese, each of those squiggles on the paper represents a sound or an idea. Block play is also symbolic: when children construct with blocks they are representing ideas. Expressing ideas in concrete ways prepares children to symbolise ideas in abstract ways later. Think of block play as a language in which children weave elaborate narratives. It is a language in which boys in particular become amazingly fluent. The boy in this photo is Ian. He had rebuilt, in intricate detail, a map on the flyleaf of his favourite storybook. I asked Ian’s teacher Martha, “Could Ian have drawn that map with paper and pencil?” She replied that the pinnacle of Ian’s mark-making skills was drawing rainbows. Nothing more advanced than that. If Ian were not fluent in this language of blocks – if he did not have this medium in which to express his ideas – no one would have known that he had that map memorised!

I hope you are as excited by this as I am. It makes me realise how vital it is that we provide each child with a medium in which he or she feels at home. Then children can build their own strong foundation for future literacy.

When I was little my brothers and I used to transform our kitchen table into a den. My sister and I also used to turn our bunk-bed into a ship. A generation later, I watched my children finding or creating their own cosy spaces. Visiting nurseries in recent years, I often notice a lack of intimate corners into which children can withdraw from all the busy activity. Many rooms are full of cushions and equipment but there is nowhere for a child to have a little personal space. Some settings have found a way to provide such nooks, even if it is not much more than some material draped in a corner. But it is difficult for many because they are not allowed to attach anything to their walls. That's why we designed these new Cosy spaces. Some, like the Swallow's nest, have been figured out for you – but you can also take the panels, posts and arches and design your own cosy spaces for the children in your care. Have fun!

6 January is traditionally 'Three Kings Day' for many cultures. This year it came last Friday, and as I walked past our local nursery that morning, here's what I saw: The children had spontaneously built camels, which they mounted and rode (don't be scared – none of them fell off) singing 'We three kings of Orient are' at top volume! You can see how engrossed they were. I love how they use the hollow blocks for whatever they need at the moment – and they never run out of ideas.

We asked Siren Films to spend a week in Pen Green's Baby and Toddler Nest to film activity on and around our new Nursery Gym. It's exciting to observe young children benefiting from the new gym. Enjoy young adventurers using the gym's ramp, slide, steps, tunnel and bridge. Watch them experiment with cause-and-effect, action and sound – and then see them snuggle into its cosy hidey-holes. Supporting healthy physical development is the primary function of the gym, but children's spontaneous social interactions and their trial-and-error problem solving show how this equipment serves all areas of learning. With an introduction by Dr Margy Whalley and sensitive narration throughout, this 20-minute DVD can stimulate discussion about the importance of physical activity and positive risk for young children.

For your FREE copy of the DVD, email us with your current mailing address or phone 0800 387 457.

Through the centuries those who care for children have understood the significance of a child's surroundings. Already in the 1800s, the childcare expert Froebel stressed the importance of environmental design in the sense of a garden, natural, organic, ever-changing. He maintained that when care is applied to children's surroundings, behaviour can be guided and inspired. The simplest of locations can become a haven of play and learning.

The amount of space in a room and how it is organised affects children's behaviour. A tight space may encourage working together but can also lead to aggression and frustration. Reducing clutter and installing flexible furnishings can maximize the use of each area. On the other hand, too much space in a room can cause children to be restless and unfocused and have low interaction with their peers. Using dividers to create activity areas or pockets reduces distraction and can help teachers facilitate absorbed play.

Are the children in your care deeply engrossed in their activities, or are many at loose ends? The difference may well stem from room layout, good or bad. As you are choosing the furniture you will also want to consider the way in which the furniture is laid out. This is why we offer a free room layout service which can help you create flexible learning environments and design ideal interest areas which will encourage the behaviour that you want to nurture.

Young children learn through movement and play. Action is essential for their healthy development. The Nursery gym provides up-and-down and over-and-under activity as well as varied tactile experience.

Crossing an arched bridge is a challenge which young children repeat over and over. Once they have mastered that, there's a new challenge to discover.

Outdoor activity helps children keep a positive outlook. There is no aspect of the national curriculum that cannot be taught outdoors at the Key Stage 1 level. This approach is shared by Coombes Primary School where they state, ‘We continue to develop our outdoor environment as our largest classroom.’

Froebel maintained that the capacity to struggle persistently lies at the foundation of character; children love to encounter challenge in play and work. Outdoor involvement provides such challenge.

Children develop their vestibular sense (balance) through teetering, tipping, spinning, swinging, rocking, jumping, bouncing, sliding and fast forward motion. They have a biological drive for such experiences and use any opportunity to run, slide down banisters, roll down hills, hop from place to place. In order to develop perfect coordination of body and brain, children need action in which their muscles encounter resistance: pushing, pulling, stretching, carrying. They like to hang from bars, to dig and rake, to feel tension in their limbs. Skipping rope, climbing trees, pedalling bicycles and pushing wheelbarrows are actions that fill this need and only happen outdoors. Significantly, movement is actually what allows children to sit still.

From Lighting the fire – a free booklet on outdoor play and hands-on learning.