Sometimes there’s no better feeling than stumbling across something that makes you wish you’d discovered it sooner - it’s an eureka moment in which your brain goes electric and you can just sense that you’ve found a good, good thing.

I occasionally get this feeling when I listen to music on Spotify and a new song bursts out on my phone which makes me sit up and take note. I’ve had this recently with the band Wolf Alice who I came across while report writing (it needed a soundtrack!). Similarly the band Pale Waves came out of the blue and I’ve been hooked ever since, with the release of each new single being met with teen-type excitement and anticipation (it probably helps that the drummer wears a Cure t-shirt...)

I get the same type of sensation when I unearth new ways to tweak or develop my Early Years practice too. Though the idea of the 3Ms has remained consistent, its beauty is because they are so flexible, the 3Ms enable you to experiment and adapt your interactions and teaching of young children.

Sometimes these tweaks emerge from the constant discussion about our practice and children which my team engage in throughout each day. Because we’re not driven by written records, we can have dialogue that is responsive to what we see before us. Our team culture is one of contribution and idea-sharing so it’s natural to find us shaping our setting or approach to respond to need and next steps. We can only do this because we are not topic-led and staff time and energy can be spent on skills rather than activity, displays and Pinterest.

At other times the tweaks come directly from the children. When this happens, it’s definitely time to feel excited and it’s an even better feeling than hearing music no matter what tshirt the drummer might be wearing...

As I get older, the transience of life is increasingly becoming a stark reality. I’ve moved out of the ‘friends having children’ phase and am being invited to less and less weddings. Nowadays it’s the funeral phase and the lasting sense of grief and loss that marks it. A wedding or a birth are great but the hangover from these is gone within a day (or two depending if the wedding has the foresight of a free bar). The ‘hangover’ following a death is absolutely something else and beyond a hair of the dog.

Children on the whole live in a bubble away from this - their world isn’t the world of ‘passing on’, ‘resting in peace’ or ‘a good innings’. That’s not to say that there aren’t many, many children who don’t experience death or aren’t affected by it. It’s just that for the majority of children they are in the ‘pure bright living’ phase of life - the realm of magic, the world of ‘song’.

So it’s extraordinary when they do come across death especially in nature. Their response, their wonder even, is something that opens up a door into their realm and it’s this door that can only be opened when we let go of ‘planning’ and embrace faith in children, faith that enables discovery and in this instance the finding of a very small but very dead vole in the woods...

Increasingly, or so it would seem, we are becoming a nation of Indoor-ers. Our time is spent within the shelter of our homes, locked out from the world around us, living contented with merely seeing it through the lens of an phone screen or tablet.

Children live in a time of nature deficit, they are less connected to the natural world than previous generations, with words, pastimes and ways slowly eroding in the face of the immediacy and buzz of social media and the Now-ness that lies within the touch of a finger tip.

Much of this has been caused by fear. Fear of what might happen if we venture too far, fear of others, fear of a threat, one that is perpetuated by the press and heresay. Children are being shaped to feel safer indoors and to value online connection above the healing of interaction with the natural world.

Not all children are like this of course but it certainly feels like the majority are. And how did they end up this way? Because they watched the adults do it. Because the adult world suggested a new reality, a new way of living that could provide all without needing to leave the house.

The reality is that we have a generation of children who’s first instinct is not to look outside but to plug in. Children at an increasingly young age seem to be head down, transfixed by pixels and sound, oblivious of surroundings. And who hands these over? Who buys these devices to keep children quiet, entertain them, occupy them while the world goes about is business? The adults. They’ve evolved the TV’s role as an occasional nanny to become an ever-present, all-absorbing childminder.

Don’t get me wrong I love technology.

Children want to take risk. It’s part of their growth, their inner learning curve. Risk is one of the many ways that they begin to make sense of the world, how they weigh it up and give value to their experiences. Yet as adults we’re often very quick to intervene. We either project our own fear into them with a hasty “Careful!” or we shut down the experience even before it’s begun.

We as adults need to take a risk. We need to find our faith in children, give them space to discover for themselves, to investigate, explore and test. We need to come away from experiences that have been pre-ordained and controlled so that they can throw themselves into their environment. The greatest risk we can take is to begin a journey of un-planning, of un-controlling. Our desire for outcome, our innate programmed idea of what school should be, the adult world demand for ‘school readiness’, school policies that are often devoid of child-centred pedagogy are all things that create fear within us as adults. We project this onto the children in our setting. We try to control because we perceive that control gives us ‘learning’.

But in reality it is giving us un-learning. This fear, the inability to let go and let children BE, results in the erosion of play, a classroom based climate, timetables that restrict, and if children do get to venture outside, a risk assessment process that puts fear right back at the heart of the experience.

It’s time to take a risk. It’s time to put children back at the centre. It time to truly embrace the magic of children. How can you take action to change your little corner of the world? How can you shape the children in your setting to be the Outsiders they can and ought to be? There’s no better time than now - un-plan, un-fear, un-risk...

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Robert Downey Jnr. I don’t know if it’s his good looks or his bad boy image but there’s just something about him that makes me want to watch his movies. I liked Iron Man and the less well-known Through A Scanner Darkly but my favourite by far has to be his portayal of Sherlock Holmes; a madcap, other-worldly, flawed, yet brilliant genius.

It might be reading too much into the character of Sherlock Holmes but I’m often struck by how he always seems obsessively exploring ‘meaning’, an incessant search for something beyond the obvious or not-so-obvious that leads down a labyrinthian path until the truth rears its head - usually a truth that Sherlock has discovered long before the doting Watson or the bumbling police led by the well-meaning but ultimately blinkered Inspector Lestrade have even begun to put two and two together.

I can’t help but think that this search for meaning, this drive to interpret the evidence before our eyes is very reminiscent of working in Early Years. Unfortunately this isn’t always in a good way...