Features

Enabling Environments: Making Spaces...Baby room

Anne O'Connor offers advice on creating a baby room that promotes physical activity, fosters exploration and supports rest in surroundings with familiar, special adults always at hand.

We are planning to increase our baby room space and want to make the most of this opportunity to review the quality of this aspect of our provision. What principles should guide our decisions about environment and resources?

It's difficult to be brief about baby room provision but starting from a principled perspective is wise as this helps keeps the focus on the very particular needs of babies and the practitioners who care for them.

There is a lot of new and current reading material available on the subject, all building on the valuable work of the past and all well worth reading again. Revisit Birth to Three Matters - A framework to support children in their earliest years (DfES, 2002) with its clear messages about the principles of working with small babies as well as classics such as People Under Three: Young children in daycare (Goldschmied and Jackson, 2nd ed, 2004) alongside recently published What Happens in the Baby Room? (Community Playthings, 2012).

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