An open letter to my son’s teacher
Emily is a 31-year-old mother of two boys under three. Her first blog post in March 2015 went viral, reaching more than one million people in a few days. Emily is the New Zealand Herald’s parenting columnist, and parenting columnist for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. She founded and runs a charity called Ballet is for Everyone that provides free ballet...
Using the right avenue to engage with vulnerable families
Around three years ago, in an early learning centre, a child was placed under a protection order to attend five days a week because the child’s mum was unable to adequately support his learning and development. This is a scenario that plays out across Australia more than we would like. Many of you reading will be familiar with this type...
Changing the presentation of your stories
You have spent the time and effort to create an amazing story, capturing a child’s learning moments and shared your insights on how that child’s emergent interests can best be supported. Now you want that story to pop out. Storypark allows you to select from an array of formatting options so that you can quickly and easily set it apart....
Children moving between services
One of the great things about Storypark is that it can follow the child. That means that when a child comes to you from another learning service, or maybe returns to your service after a time away, you can have access to the learning that was captured before they came to your service. So you will be able to understand...
Spell check
You have just created a detailed learning story for one of the children at your learning service. You have captured the child’s learning in that moment, intentionally recognised the learning that has occurred, and expounded on how this learning/interest can be extended or more complexity added. You click publish to send it off to the parent… and that’s when you...
Changing rooms
Moving from one room to another can be a very important transition for a child. With Storypark, the aim is to make that transition as simple as possible. Rooms in Storypark are just a way of sorting through the full list of children you have at your centre. That makes it simpler for when teachers are creating stories and selecting...
Families with multiple children at a centre
It is always great when a child’s brother or sister starts at your centre. So we want to make sure that it is as simple as possible to share that with the parents. That means you can invite them with the same email address for each child, in the same straightforward way as you do for any child. First of...
Making family admins
Storypark only allows one parent to be invited for each child, so that there is less chance of the wrong parent being invited for a child. That does mean though that when one parent has been invited, they need to invite the other parent as family. However, there is a way they can give them the same visibility of community...
Documenting your continuous professional learning
Being a teacher can also mean being a learner. You need to be able to make observations and capture reflections on what you learn as part of your teaching practice, as well as what the outcomes for children have been. Continuous professional learning is an important part of any vocation, especially so when nurturing the futures of so many young...
Is it wrong to love the children you teach?
When studying to become an early childhood educator, I always remember a lecturer stressing the importance of maintaining a professional distance from becoming too close to the children you teach. It was unprofessional to develop strong feelings for children. I always struggled with this as I am a feelings person. I often asked myself “is it wrong to love the...