Author: Elizabeth Jarman

Garden International School, Malaysia

It’s great to see mainstream magazines picking up on the whole area of learning environments and questioning if convention classrooms are a thing of the past. This short piece highlights some of the fantastic work that is continuing to evolve at Garden International School in KL. We’ve been working together for a few years now. There’s a podcast on the home page of my website discussing some of the theory behind the changes made.

http://happygokl.com/are-conventional-classrooms-a-thing-of-the-past/

 

Bright Stars Nursery, Sunderland, UK

Bright Stars Nursery, Sunderland, UK

Our environment at Bright Stars Nursery consists of one purpose built room and a large outside space. We cater for children from birth to 5 years. Before we started implementing Elizabeth Jarman’s Communication Friendly Spaces™ Approach, our room was cluttered with tables and chairs, had no definition or specific inviting areas or spaces for children to really focus in, settle and ‘talk’. We felt our children were using the areas within the setting to run from activity to activity and did not seem to become focused on much. The noise level of the whole nursery was very loud and it felt chaotic. Resources lacked in terms of quality, there was no character and the space just seemed unloved. We knew we had a big challenge on our hands.