Encourage Community Awareness and Involvement with the new “Where I Live” Group Learning Journal and Aistear-linked Curriculum Plans

Community awareness and involvement are important for all of us, particularly for children in Early Years educational settings.

The Early Years Shop (a Service of Canavan Byrne) are excited to launch their new "Documentation Made Simple" series with our new "Where I Live" Group Learning Journal. This is a beautifully designed oversize A3 Scrapbook on the "Where I Live" community theme. Along with the Group Learning Journal we bundle our Where I Live Curriculum Plan Pack and some of our curriculum plans from other packs. This is a bundle of curriculum ideas that you can use to respond to the children's curiosity and emerging interests in their localities. Community involvement is an element of evaluation included in the DES (Department of Education & Skills) inspection.

Documenting your observations of the children in the room is fun and easy with our Group Learning Journal. This is both a helpful aid to showing documentation of your working within the Aistear framework in case of inspection, shows your commitment to the children's awareness and involvement in the local community and is also a lovely document for everyone to look at together at the end of the year.

In addition to playing, thinking and learning about your local community and the people who live and work there, remember to be aware of opportunities for children to be involved in community projects around art, performance or volunteer work. Is there a local clean-up day that your service could participate in? Are there other opportunities for the children to help out with community-based activities?