Learning Journals and special books have grown in popularity over the last decade, offering early years settings a way to record the special moments of their children, and to keep parents involved in a partnership as their children blossom and grow. More recently they have been used in conjunction with the EYFS developmental stages to assess more formally how children are progressing.
Traditionally these individual records have been collected in scrapbooks or binders, building up into a treasured memoir that children can take with them when they leave for the next stages of their journey through life – each entry forming a thread in the warp and weft of the tapestry that is their life.
The cost, in both time and money, of providing these journals has often caused great problems for managers and staff in EYFS settings. The purchase of the scrap books alone can be significant, and printing photographs, and cutting, pasting and writing in the journals is a time consuming affair.
Additionally, managers experience the trauma of sending their journals home with parents, only to find they return them late or even lose them. In the event of parents who are separated it can be difficult to make the journals available to both in a fair way; and if one parent is away for other reasons (for example a serving member of the armed forces who is on active duties) it is impossible to use the physical journal as a means of keeping up to date with a son or daughter.
What if it were possible to create records of observations instantly? To add notes and images and have them immediately available to any authorised person as part of the complete story of the child’s life at their nursery. To have parents able to view and comment on these special moments, and to be able to contribute their own stories of the child’s life outside nursery?
This is what we call Tapestry. Online Learning Journals, from the imagineers at the FSF!
The information above was taken from the Tapestry website. For more information on tapestry please visit https://tapestry.info/index.html/
