“The Curiosity Approach is a modern day approach to Early Childhood. Taking parts from Reggio, Steiner, Te Whāriki with a sprinkle of Montessori. It’s a beautiful recipe book of wonderful ingredients, carefully mixed together with experience, passion and a love of Early Childhood. It’s baked together in a mindful oven of loveliness that needs thoughtful practitioners and professionals to be mentally present, thankful and forever curious about their career with little children. Be Curious, Have Fun, Make a Difference!”
This is taken from one of the blogs from their website…….
At The Curiosity Approach, we believe in giving children responsibility to handle and play with breakable items. Ceramic tea pots and tea sets replace the bright plastic child sized ones that we all have always used.
Traditionally, early years settings have used brightly coloured child sized tea sets. Cups & saucers of red, yellow, green and blue, adorn the majority of nursery home corners. Each has been purchased to encourage colour recognition & allow children the opportunity to match items and provide a safe, purposeful addition to the play kitchens in home corners of our nurseries, or educational settings.
So, what other benefits do these miniature unrealistic items have?
Plastic tea sets are robust & don’t break.
Is this REALLY a good thing?
Plastic tea sets, up and down the country last for years, they get dropped & thrown, used in the water play area or in the outside sand pit. They get coloured or scribbled on & sometimes scratched and occasionally chewed.They get flung across the room or dumped without care or regard.
Children subconsciously & consciously know this, they think it’s ok to treat these resources any way they like because these items are virtually indestructible. So, is this a good thing?
There are therefore no consequences to children’s actions-
It really doesn’t matter if a tea cup gets catapulted across the home corner. Or a saucer literally becomes a flying missile from one side of the sand pit to the other!
These resources don’t break, they don’t bend and they can withstand any man (child) handling, mistreatment or total disregard for it, as a piece of nursery equipment!
What messages are we giving our children, when everything we allow them to play with is PRETEND and an unbreakable resource?
You can find out much more at www.thecuriosityapproach.com, pop on over and take a look.