Letting go of anything in life can be an incredibly disturbing and stressful experience . It can however, with time, be the most empowering, exciting and liberating thing you can ever do.

Think of any thing, memory, person, idea or habit that is somehow holding you back or affecting you adversely. If you imagined letting go of it can you sense how amazing this would feel? The clarity, the new-ness, the vitality that would enter your life would surely make the initial panic and self-doubt worthwhile.

And yet how many of us stick to what we've always done, stay on the path that becomes a treadmill? The reason we do this is that we have become detached from our 'why' or because we know no different than the path that has been defined for us. As Early Years practitioners we follow in the footsteps of others because we have our eyes so firmly fixed on trying to shoehorn children into 'what-I-see-others-do'  or 'what-I-think-children-will-want-to-do'. When we do this we fall into the trap of Early Years By Numbers. We join the dots through Google searches and investing time in Pinterest Provision. 

Previous blogs have explored the necessity of recognising that children have a magic within them that all too often the adult world chooses to ignore for its own ends or through its unwavering appetite to stick with the known, the ‘what we’ve always done’.

For me it’s critical to embrace the idea that children have to be put right at the centre of our educational thinking. Unless we do that we will be continually shackled to topic-based planning, Pinterest Provision and activity-centric experiences which not only plan ‘over the top’ of children but also steer a course for them rather than allowing them the space to navigate for themselves.

As soon as we re-imagine our thinking through the consideration of a clear and passionate ‘why’ then we begin to see a seismic shift in how children might engage with their learning, turning it from something that is done to them and towards something that they are actively rooted in with purpose and meaning.