Yesterday morning I woke up before my alarm, which is an extremely unusual occurrence! Instead of reaching for my phone to snooze the noise, I turned over and looked out of the window; the blue sky was full of broken clouds, tinged with brilliant hues of pink and red. It was somewhat refreshing to spend 5 minutes doing something I very rarely do – nothing. Nothing except appreciate what I could see, without anything else distracting my thoughts. The world we live in is an extremely busy place; technologies are constantly evolving and the stream of information we receive on a daily basis is almost incessant. Our attachment to phones and computers, albeit necessities in our daily lives, have meant that it is very difficult for us to switch off and avoid a constant barrage of communication; work emails, WeChat messages, news headlines, delivery information, calendar reminders… … As early years practitioners we are very lucky. Yes, our lives are just as busy as everyone else’s with our jobs, our families and our friends, but every day we are surrounded by 300 children.
Their thoughts are not, and nor should they be, focused on to do lists, making sure there’s something in the fridge for dinner or finding the time to take the dog to vet. Instead, their minds are occupied with making a bracelet for their (pretend) pet turtle, mixing the correct amount of water, glue and washing up liquid to blow the perfect bubble and creating a papier mâché version of Mercury to hang from the ceiling. Our pupils think about the here and now, they follow their own interests and they see the ‘sparkle’ in the ordinary. A lot of sparkle happens every day within the Hiba Nursery and I’d like to share just a couple of examples with you:
The EY2 pupils have just finished their learning about ‘Dear Zoo’ and are moving on to look at the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. A little boy was very busy organising different coloured circular stickers onto a piece of felt when he turned to me with a huge smile and passed me a page, urging me to do the same. I placed a big pink one on my hand to make a nose and 2 smaller ones to make some eyes. After some thought, the little boy took the page of stickers away from me and placed another small one between the ‘eyes’ I had made. He turned my hand towards me and laughed, pointing at his foot; he had turned the ‘pig’ into a footprint. 
As he laughed, he made some more footprints by himself, carefully placing the stickers exactly where he wanted. Later on, he decided to explore the painting area on the terrace, “Look, foot!”. He had dipped a small paper cup into some paint and made a path of footprints on the table. No one had suggested making footprints to this pupil; he saw an opportunity, decided on a course of action and had the courage to have a go. 
The EY4 children crash landed on Mercury last week! They talked a lot about what the planet looks like, what they might need whilst they are there and how they could build a rocket to help them travel elsewhere. Whilst the children were eating snack, I noticed one child wearing a silver suit with sequins stuck to the front. As soon as I drew attention to it, four children were excited to tell me what it was and how they had made it. We went outside to the terrace which was covered in silver pizza box wrappers, cardboard boxes, glue and scissors.
With huge amounts of animation, the group hurriedly explained that they were making spacesuits because they were astronauts.They carefully outlined the shapes of a shirt onto the silver material, cut them out with precision and attached sequins to make “buttons for talk”. As I passed the classroom a little later, there were six little astronauts, all going about their day as usual. 
The above examples are just very small snippets of what we see every minute of every day here at Hiba Nursery; by using their imaginations and thinking outside of the box our pupils turn normal things into something new, something that makes them happy. Let’s all try to be a little bit more like them this week and take some time out of our busy day to see the sparkle in the ordinary.
