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What’s playing with mud got to do with becoming a neuroscientist?
You’d best ask Alice Sharp. She’s looking at the big picture of the Early Years — how the work we do in those first five years really follows and impacts children through their lives, right down to the careers they follow.
After 30 years in the Early Years sector, Alice has worked in just about every role you could think of. She’s delivered master classes, training days and workshops for practitioners for nearly 20 years, focusing on how educators can continue learning through their careers, and how we can best help prepare children for their futures.
I caught up with Alice Sharp at this year’s Nursery World Show to talk about what her Early Years training series is focused on these days — and how we need to rethink our teaching to make sure we’re laying the best foundations for children that we can.
You can get some of the interview’s biggest insights in the clips below, or scroll to the bottom of the page to watch the full 14-minute interview.
Alice says she’s not an academic, but she certainly does her homework. She believes that more reading and research helps Early Years practitioners turn policy into real-world practice. Having a deeper understanding of early years policies and philosophies, she says, makes it easier for practitioners to figure out how to translate those ideas into real life, in a way that really resonates with children.
While seminars and workshops have their place, Alice believes they always need to be grounded in concrete, real-world action. Every lecturer has to ask themselves, “what would this actually look like in practice?” Children’s brains are wired differently than ours, so we need to be proactive in putting these philosophies into their world.
Early Years is about meeting children wherever they’re at — but that practise is different than it was even ten years ago, Alice says. She sees a growing gap in language and vocabulary learning, which she attributes to children’s increased use of social media, and working parents having less time to spend with their children.
Alice believes the sector needs to be more proactive in combating these development gaps, which often fall along socioeconomic dividing lines. To do so, she says, we need to start by recognising that the way children grow and learn has changed a great deal, perhaps even since the years many of us finished our training.
Around the 4:40 mark, Alice talks about how good Early Years education follows children their whole lives. In her Early Years training series, Adventures with Alice, she’s particularly focused about how educators can boost children’s exposure and interest in STEM fields.
Even in advanced fields like microbiology or civil engineering, Alice sees a common thread with children’s fundamental ability for curiosity — to find out how things work, and to look for new solutions to a problem. It’s here, she says, that Continual Professional Development (CPD) is huge for the Early Years. Working to hone our understanding of how Early Years pedagogies connect to advanced skills and grown-up trades help us guide children along those paths.
Alice thinks we need a big rethinking of STEM in the Early Years. From her research, she says that younger brains are increasingly wired for more incremental learning — focusing on a broad selection of topics for a shorter time, rather than really digging into one single thing.
Especially as adults shift jobs and career paths more often, Alice says today’s Early Years educators can help children by making sure STEM skills are a part of their grown-up toolkit.
This isn’t so much about drilling them on maths assignments, but rather about showing them how their natural curiosity can translate into STEM focuses. “They need to be exposed to awe and wonder,” she says.
Just after the 8-minute mark, Alice talks about how messy play has a big role in early STEM learning. It’s an easy way to make science fun and accessible for children, and it can be as simple as mixing up a mug of hot cocoa, to understand how a basic chemical compound comes together.
So what are Alice’s go-to messy play activities? She gets into that around the 9:15 timestamp. One of her favourites is what she calls ‘clean mud’ — mixing up shredded paper, scented tissues, soap and water to create an indoor-safe mush. Outdoors, she favours the classic mud kitchen, providing utensils like potato mashers to help children interact with different materials and textures.
She says that involving children in rich, multisensory experiences opens up more brain pathways, and encourages the curiosity and experimentation that they carry through their lives.
It’s one thing to shape our Early Years approach based on the world today — but the big challenge, Alice says, is shaping it based on the world that will be. If our goal is to lay strong foundations for children’s futures, we need to think about what that future’s going to be, and what skills might be valuable in 15 or 20 years.
A lot of that hinges on Early Years educators doing more research and more reading, Alice says. And when we give lectures and seminars, we need to send people home with reference materials — they’ll learn more, and retain those lessons longer, if they have something to look back on.
Around 12:30, Alice gets into how she’s training Early Years educators today. She says she’s not a huge enthusiast about technology, but she recognises its use for her training program, Adventures with Alice. She became a primary teacher 30 years ago, and has been doing Early Years training for about 20 years. Every course she does, she had feedback saying, “I wish my team could have been here too to learn this”.
She wanted to get the Adventures with Alice program online to make her course more shareable, and to let people access it when they have time. Improving training within the sector starts with making it as accessible as possible.
Here’s the full interview with Alice Sharp, where she and I discuss:
Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English.
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The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK.
Please note: here at Famly we love sharing creative activities for you to try with the children at your setting, but you know them best. Take the time to consider adaptions you might need to make so these activities are accessible and developmentally appropriate for the children you work with. Just as you ordinarily would, conduct risk assessments for your children and your setting before undertaking new activities, and ensure you and your staff are following your own health and safety guidelines.
