Aistear In Action Report

NCCA and Early Childhood Ireland have now published the final report on the Aistear In Action (AiA) Initiative – an initiative that worked with 7 early childhood services in the North Cork/South Tipperary area to support them to engage with the Aistear Framework. Reading this Aistear in Action report will give you an insight into the growth and development of the participating practitioners and services and the mentoring process involved.  ‘Prior to Aistear in Action we had a very structured programme, with a lot of prepared work, which included worksheets and templates with all the children doing the same work at the same time. We began to see the value of small group activities, where children’s interests and ideas were listened to and incorporated into the planning of the playschool’s curriculum’.

Early Childhood Ireland Specialists used a multi-strand mentoring approach, including workshops, onsite mentoring and peer sharing to support services to engage with the challenges of Aistear and to develop their ways of thinking about learning and working with children and families.

Services often began with relatively small changes – ‘My moment of enlightenment was taking away some of the plastic equipment and replacing it with real equipment and watching how the children respected the real equipment so much more’ – to changes that totally transformed their practice – ‘We document children’s learning and development differently. We have a group learning journal in which we collaborate with the children to include photos, pieces of their work and captions of what they said. Parents love looking at this and can see what we are doing every week linked to Aistear’s themes. We also have an individual portfolio for each child which includes photos of themselves/things they have made. It also includes their drawings, writings and quotes of things they said. They love looking at this and often take it home to share with parents’.

Early childhood Ireland will now begin new programmes in specific areas based on the learning from this initiative.  Further information will be available shortly on the web.

Download the full Aistear in Action report

For more information on Aister in Action: https://www.earlychildhoodireland.ie/aistear-in-action-pathways-to-quality-in-the-ecce-sector/