This week‘s Creative Care Package highlights the plethora of incredible arts and cultural activities still happening despite Covid-19. It pays tribute to the depths of care, connection and community that the arts can reach beyond our limitations, and it celebrates 18 years of the Earlyarts network before, sadly, its final closure. Dive in and enjoy!
This week‘s Creative Care Package explores another incredible range of arts, cultural and creative activities that many organisations are offering for free. Which is pretty amazing considering many of them know now that they will not survive this pandemic. Please do share with families, friends and colleagues. One day soon we will miss all these amazing offers, just like, right now, we miss our friends and family.
This week ‘s Creative Care Package has some gorgeous activities to try out. I reveal the impact the word ‘vulnerable’ is having on, well, people who are vulnerable, and ask if we can call them valuable instead. Please feel free to share so that we can reach as many families and teachers as possible!
This week ‘s Creative Care Package brings a new selection of arts, cultural and creative activities to try out at home. I reflect on how we can use creativity to cope with big emotions and invite you to try them out with me. Please feel free to share so that we can reach as many families as possible!
This week ‘s Creative Care Package includes a bumper crop of carefully chosen arts, dance, museums, story and music activities. I offer a personal story about why this all matters to me, and hope that we can find new ways of supporting each other’s creativity in our post-covid world, whatever that might look like. Please feel free to share so that these creative hugs can reach as many families as possible!
In this strange old time, I am gathering some strange old resources - ones that are a) lovingly made by artists and cultural organisations, b) for early years and c) encourage creative processes. These will hopefully add a little spice, ingenuity and curiosity to yours and your children’s lives in the coming weeks.
In this strange old time, I am gathering some strange old resources - ones that are a) lovingly made by artists and cultural organisations, b) for early years and c) encourage creative processes. These will hopefully add a little spice, ingenuity and curiosity to yours and your children’s lives in the coming weeks.
Those of you who have been following my PhD journey have asked to see the research proposal. So here it is. Bear in mind it is written in a particular language to reflect the philosophical frame I will be engaging with (posthumanism and new materialism) and yes, it does stretch the mind somewhat! But it is also the closest and most authentic framework I have ever come across for researching how children are.
The proposed reforms to the EYFS seem to be more prescriptive than before and, in Expressive Arts and Design, limited to developing arts skills as opposed to children’s broader cultural and creative development. Ruth Churchill Dower discusses how the EYFS has been designed and how the reforms could go further to help promote creative, emotional and social attunement, celebrate multiple cultural identities, and better reflect the contemporary and diverse home learning contexts children are growing up in.
During my PhD research, I will be exploring how young children who cannot speak are situated in ways that oppress their embodied expression due to the dominant grand narratives and empiricist forces at work (Roberts-Holmes, 2015), researcher positionality, theoretical standpoints and relevance of methodologies.
The current educational climate provides an environment which privileges cognitive knowledge over any other form of knowing, the assessment of which is largely documented through written form either by children or by adults on behalf of children. Teachers are encouraged to look for the holes in each child’s knowledge, as opposed to the whole of their being and knowing, and to measure this using language as opposed to any other form of sense-expression which might speak to a young child’s expertise.
Could you distinguish between a child that has a right to education and one which doesn’t? Meet Nyima, a young girl from a remote nepali community, whose family identity is not recognised or given any right to belong in their community. Hear her story of being released from total social oppression into an education and a future.
In this blog Earlyarts Director, Ruth Churchill Dower, explores how the arts can enable young children with selective mutism to communicate by connecting brains and bodies in new and creative ways and how a new PhD research programme will explore the impact of different art forms on early brain development.
This blog is a reflection on the Songbirds music and health project that took place in Manchester, as part of a series of contributions from medical, musical and play practitioners.
bOing! International Family Festival is an annual celebration of theatre and dance at the University of Kent, Canterbury where, this year, Oily Cart theatre director, Tim Webb will be leading a debate on the quality of young children's theatre.
