Knowles Nursery School has been using Tapestry for two years to support core aspects of their child-centred practice and pedagogy.
When a child transitions to nursery, it’s natural for families to want reassurance. Having systems in place that foster trust is vital for building a strong partnership with parents going forward.
From the very beginning of a child’s time with them, staff at Knowles use the Observations feature on Tapestry to share photos and videos with parents. This helps to reassure families during the crucial settling in period and beyond.
At the same time, staff keep parents informed about the setting using Memos to send out newsletters or to share reminders.
“Our relationships with our families are fundamental to their child’s development.
Tapestry helps parents to know their child is safe and happy – it helps us to allay those fears when a child is settling in.
And it really helps to make communication and engagement easier.”
Headteacher Natalie Fowler
Educators encourage families to talk with their child about the photos and videos added to Tapestry. These prompt valuable conversations at home, helping parents to understand the important role they have in their child’s development.
“When parents look at those photos and videos with their child, it really supports the child’s recall and language development.”
Headteacher Natalie Fowler
At Knowles, staff understand that one of the most important aspects of nurturing their partnership with parents is the insight it gives them about every child. The team start by encouraging parents to ‘like’ observations and leave comments as a way of interacting and getting involved in their child’s experiences.
As parents and carers become more confident, they can upload their own photos and videos to share the learning that happens at home. These tell educators so much about children’s interests and development, as well as providing opportunities to celebrate each child.
“We encourage parents and carers to ‘like’ and comment on the things we send them, and once they get used to the idea that we love to see photos about their child from them too, it sort of snowballs and we can learn loads about the child.
We reinforce this by sharing any photos sent from home when we have group time with the children.”
Assistant Headteacher Liz Jones
The staff at Knowles are always looking for ways to enable their good practice, and Tapestry is one of the tools they use to support them.
The team organise their observations using Flags, which can be added to fit their own curriculum, making sure that everything feeds back into their provision for every child. Flags also enable the leadership team to have an overview of all the areas of learning, so they can look at where they need to make adaptations.
“Tapestry helps us with the nuts and bolts of how everything fits together.
We use the flags on our observations, and these mean we can see whether there are any gaps in our provision as a whole as well as what we can do to support an individual child.
It helps us embed this good practice across the team.”
Assistant Headteacher Liz Jones
The team use video of children learning captured with Tapestry as part of their professional development and reflective practice. These can inform one to one mentoring or staff meeting discussions.
Knowles have been developing their use of Tapestry to support their children with learning differences and disabilities. Bespoke Frameworks enables them to record children’s individual targets by linking observations to the exact learning outcomes they have chosen for their children.
This allows staff, families and other relevant professionals to see, follow and adapt the unique framework that is made for each child.
“It is so important to us to have inclusive systems in place that work for all our children, especially those who need additional support.
We are really excited about this new way of using Tapestry to simply and easily develop individual frameworks for our children with SEND.
It will help our team and those who work with us, as well as the children.”
Headteacher Natalie Fowler
They are also exploring Reflections and Page Links to help them complete EHCP and LA funding applications for children, ensuring observations, reports and documents about a child are easy to find and refer to.
Tapestry has these and many more features, including Nursery Management Software, available for the cost of your subscription, with no hidden extras.
Is Tapestry what you’re looking for? Get started for free today – use exclusive code TEYWEB624 when requesting a trial to try Tapestry for eight weeks.*
*Usually two weeks. Code expires on 05/07/24. No card details required.
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