Every day, early years practitioners engage in interactions with young children that have the potential to enhance their learning.
This full-day online seminar will examine the knowledge, timing and sensitivity necessary to interact effectively and, as a consequence, build important relationships and enhance children’s well-being and motivation to communicate.
Date & Time
Thursday 21st January 2027
9.30am – 3.30pm
Price
£150 (exc. VAT) per person
What’s covered
Throughout the day, Julie’s own research will be woven with expectations from the EYFS programmes of study for Communication and Language and the recent ‘Best Start in Life’ documents from Ofsted, in order for delegates to reflect on different ways they might extend and enhance children’s language and communication through natural, genuine, everyday conversations.
Through the use of film footage, delegates will have a number of opportunities to observe other practitioners engaged in interactions both indoors and outdoors, and in both adult-led and child-led situations. There will then be ample time for discussion and reflection on what has been seen, and to come to personal decisions about how best to tune in to children’s current thinking and respond in ways that are of benefit to their learning and development.
Julie’s experience
Julie Fisher is an independent Early Years Adviser and Visiting Professor of Early Childhood Education at Oxford Brookes University.
She held the post of Early Years Adviser in Oxfordshire for 11 years, before which she was lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Reading. She has taught children from 3 to 12 years and has been headteacher of two urban, multi-cultural schools. To underpin her consultancy work, Julie draws on her own research projects which engage her in constant contact with practitioners and children in both schools and settings
What will be addressed
- What makes an interaction ‘effective’?
- Why talking to – and listening to – children matters so much
- How to best achieve ‘back and forth’ interactions
- Who ‘leads the learning?’ and how this alters the role of the educator
- How and why interactions outdoors differ from those indoors
- The importance of timing in achieving effective interactions
- How to extend, enhance and enrich children’s language
- How questioning can inhibit thinking – and what to do instead
- When, whether and why an interaction becomes interference
Recommended for
- Early Years leaders and teachers