Inspiring a love of learning during lockdown.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This quote by Maya Angelou often enters my mind when I think of the UK’s education system, especially in early years and primary school.

I trained as a primary school teacher in 2005 but becoming a mum of 3 fun loving boys really taught me how children develop and learn. When my usually happy-go-lucky and magical 5 year old son developed severe school anxiety, I had many sleepless nights trawling the internet and trying to fathom out what had happened, and how I could help him.

My older son was never keen on school and would often suffer from post restraint collapse immediately after school, but this was different. He was completely miserable, irritable and withdrawn at school and would fall apart when I picked him up.

The rise of Covid-19 and the resulting school closure was a blessing for my son, although the post traumatic stress did not vanish immediately. He shuddered when he saw a photo of his teacher on the school’s lockdown video. She had said there was nothing she could praise him for and that he needed to leave his creativity at home.

His confidence was in shreds and he needed reassurance by the bucketload. Luckily, his little brother, a real “man of the people” at the tender age of 3, and I became his allies.

I quickly realised that in order to restore my son’s mental health and happiness, he needed a lot of fun, laughter, creativity, cuddles and active, outdoor adventure.

I devoured “School and the Magic of Children” by Greg Bottrill and the lyrics “I’ve got Soul but I’m not a soldier.” rang loudly in my head. I then became intrigued by Greg’s pedagogy on canigoandplaynow.com and put it into practice with my sons.

The Message Centre, Drawing Club, Play projects and Adventure Island all worked their magic on the boys. We spent hours in the garden, hiding, finding and returning messages to magical creatures. We ran around and jumped up high when we could feel the “Bog baby bus” travelling under the ground. We made kindness potions and made markings with chalk to keep the “Robber King” at bay.

As I asked my son to teach me how to draw his characters, his confidence began to grow and the best part about the characters he drew were their big beaming smiles.

I discovered the Play First Summit, a Free online Early Childhood Education Conference hosted by Fairy Dust Teaching. There were many inspirational speakers including Maggie Dent, Mine Conkbayir, Rae Pica, Teacher Tom, and Marghanita Hughes. These speakers all agreed that it’s vital that we stop stealing childhood in the name of Education.

After so long in teaching, I was astounded that Mine Conkbayir’s trauma informed approach to teaching had never been included in teacher training programmes. Now I was able to understand why children behaved the way they did and Conkbayir’s Keep your Cool Tool Box worked brilliantly when my son became distressed. I could encourage him to name the feeling to tame it and work on mindfulness techniques in order to reset the panic button in his brain. Her assertion that stressed brains cannot learn makes perfect sense and her toolkit is an excellent way to recover a stressed brain so that it is more open to learning.

Through Conkbayir I also discovered Amanda Peddle and her amazing books about Tam’s journey in which Tam meets a sloth who teaches him how his brain and body works when he is feeling upset and how he can overcome these feelings.

After discussing and absorbing these fabulous resources together, a highlight for me was seeing how my son regulated his anxious emotions as he tried to climb the Cliffs of Dover on a windy day. He quickly sat down for a quick yoga pose and meditation which reframed and regulated his emotions so that he could jump up and continue to climb happily to the top of the Cliffs.

Rae Pica questioned why we should expect children to sit still when we wouldn’t expect baby goats to do the same. These words came back to me in the summer as we were climbing up a very steep hill which i used to ride up and down as a child on my pony. My son declared that we needed to zig-zag up the hill like mountain goats as he had seen it on Go Jetters, from Cbeebies.

His statement was one of many which made me realise that he actually did have a thirst for learning, but that the school environment had put him off. He would fall asleep clutching Letterland books and Numberblocks magazines.

During the summer we got a bell tent for the garden and would camp out at night. We snuggled up to read all 12 Captain Underpants novels by torchlight together which inspired lots of laughter and increased the boys’ vocabulary enormously. I was struck by the fact that Dav Pilkey also struggled at school but used his creativity to inspire children and adults with a whole host of graphic novels.

As the late Sir Ken Robinson affirmed, “Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They’re suffering from childhood.”