Description
- Subject Area: Children’s Literacy, particularly 0-5yrs
- Type: Forum
- Length: 7hrs
- Level: professionals who work with young children including educators, community organisations and parent/carers.
- Organisers: Moreton Bay Regional Council Libraries and First5Forever (State Library of Queensland)
- Presenters: Keynote: Nathan Wallis (neuroscience educator), Holly Rynsent (community development worker).
- Format: Morning session with keynote speakers then 3 40minute workshops in the afternoon.
- Date: 14/2/20
The Festival of Play presented on the importance of children’s literacy and language development through play. The keynote speaker in Nathan was very engaging and it was quite fascinating to hear from the neuroscience perspective on children’s development. Although some of the afternoon workshops were relatively interesting there were some that seemed a bit of a waste and I certainly wouldn’t be rushing to do them again.
I attended this training because it was being offered through work and it did sound interesting, particularly the key note speaker and the workshops such as the afternoon music workshop. And because working in a public library and constantly facilitating programs for children and parents I thought it would help keep me informed and create new ideas.
Nathan Wallis as the key note speaker was certainly the highlight of this forum, and working in a public library you don’t often think about the neuroscience behind children so that was quite fascinating to learn about. The workshops were more on the practical side and aligned more with my daily work within the library and the events we run for children, particularly the children’s literacy programs.
The afternoon workshops I participated in were the Sing & Grow, Communities for Children Logan and Without play-no learning? With these three workshops, I selected to attend, I did pick ones that I would gain the most transferrable skills to potentially take what I learnt back to my library. The Sing & Grow was interesting and with my background in music was probably the one I was excited for, and although it was interesting enough we did activities that I am already doing daily with my children’s literacy sessions.
I found one of the presenters quite interesting in seeing the messy play that they created within a community, and thought it would be quite interesting to bring such a program to work.
This forum did attract a wide variety of professions and experiences, so it was great to network with others and to learn about what others are doing within the area of children’s literacy.
After seeing what other organisations are doing with regards to free/messy play for children, I was really excited to take that back to work to attempt to start something similar up on a smaller scale. This did not happen between council processes and then COVID19 shutting most face-to-face programing down for the foreseeable future.
