Teacher Spotlight: The EYFS Sisters

EYFS sisters Miss Hannon & Mrs Mullally speak about their lockdown teaching experiences, turning boring remote learning into singing, dancing.. and even baking!

‘Hello everybody!

We are sisters who are lucky enough to be working together in the EYFS at a form entry school (we love it!). We must admit this year has had its fair share of challenges. When we first heard that schools would be teaching remotely we actually found the idea quite daunting. Our initial reaction was ‘Oh my goodness! How are we going to manage to teach 4 and 5-year-olds online effectively?’.

Let’s just say we had a few sleepless nights, brainstorming and lots of late-night and early morning conversations to come up with the model that we are currently using. In order to engage children we felt that the most important thing we needed to do was meet the children in their world, and continue to tailor learning to their interests (just like we do in class).

In essence, we became CBeebies presenters/Mr Tumble overnight!

We have personalised the children’s learning and created lots of YouTube learning videos which are sent to the children daily, we dress up, sing, dance, act – you name it (anything to get/keep the children engaged). Alongside our pre-recorded lessons using YouTube and zoom, we also do daily lives – dance with us, bake with us, Playdoh making, storytimes and singing! These have been wonderful too, but we must admit we might start pre-recording the sentence ‘Just mute yourself sweetheart’ haha!

During week one of remote learning, we decided we would give it our best shot and plan week two after looking at the engagement of the children and feedback from parents from the first week. WOW! We were totally blown away with the interaction, quality of work received and feedback. So much so that our first week became our permanent.

We must admit, as much as we are missing the little superstars, we have absolutely adored every minute of remote teaching, we are the first to admit that it’s not been easy, but it has been truly magical. We are bursting with pride at the work that children have been producing and we genuinely do not know how the parents are doing it. We understand that it is so hard for parents working from home too but they seem to have just got on with it, they really have gone above and beyond!’