First Steps children’s centre, part
of Westminster Children's Society, has created a reading
and writing project called 'A Winter’s Tale'.
Through A Winter’s Tale we aim to promote positive
home links by asking the children to write about their winter
experiences, draw pictures or bring in photographs of activities
they have participated in this winter. Parents are invited
to come into the nursery to read to the children or to make
up their own winter’s tale, and also share the experiences
they had as a child during the winter season.
We also plan to start up a book club, which will enable
children to borrow books from us. We will encourage children
to write and draw reviews of the books they have read. We
aim to have a book of the month, which children can become
familiar with and share views on, taking it in turns to
borrow the book.
We also want to start a book share, where children will
bring in old books that they can donate towards the library,
or books to swap with other children.
Excitingly, we have two new additions to the nursery -
Holly and Ivy, our reading penguins.
These are going to go home with two different children
every evening: the aim is that the child will choose a book
to read the penguin at bedtime. They will take home some
pencils and penguin paper and write about how they looked
after the penguin and about the book they read to Holly
or Ivy. We think that this will be a fun way for the children
to choose books, try reading books and have stories read
to them (and the penguins!)
We hope that this project will keep inspiring new ideas
from ourselves, children and parents, and we aim to follow
up as many as we are able to. We have only just started
our project on writing about experiences, but parents have
been very enthusiastic towards this idea. Our parents have
taken an interest in the idea of reading to the children
as well.
Another idea we have talked about is to lend out equipment
(cameras, dictaphones etc) so that parents can make up stories
with their children in a variety of ways and record them
through different media. We even have some camcorders –
this would be another way to share home links and stories.
The book room is now decorated as a 'winter wonderland',
so that the children relate the theme to the books. Again,
parents have been interested to see this room and how it
is relating to our current reading and writing project.
We hope that this will thrive as a project and look forward
to seeing the end result.
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