The Curiosity Approach
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.
At Yelvertoft Pre-School...we like to be more CURIOUS.
The children can be found playing with ordinary household items such as curtain rings, photo frames and spare parts, brass parts, ceramics, type writers and old phones to name just a few.
But Where are the toys? The bright plastic cars? The colourful bricks?
It’s all about a new approach to playing and learning – The Curiosity Approach –
An approach developed by 2 nursery owners in the Midlands, Lyndsay Hellyn and Stephanie Bennett.
The ethos is about using a child’s natural curiosity and their imagination, to go back to basics with the use of wooden resources, ordinary household items and bric-a-brac.
It’s been a great success at Yelvertoft Pre-School and really encourages the children to use their creativity. You hand them a toy car and track and and its just a car and a track, you hand them spare parts and they create their own track; tunnels and loops...and the vehicle is a Nascar or a taxi, or a bike or a rocket...the possibilities are whatever the child imagineers!
The children are now using china plates and teapots, learning how to handle precious items.
Instead of string and beads, they are using nuts and bolts and have a reading hut made out of some canes and hessian.
So it’s out with the big bright coloured plastic tubs of plastic toys and in with the homely items.
Some would say it is like taking a step back in time and it is in a way – back to basics but the children are already loving every minute of it.
