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What is the Early Years Clip Library and how can it help you?

The Early Years Clip Library is a new online resource consisting of hundreds of short training videos.

The clips are divided into categories:

• Child development
• Effective learning
• Materials & environments
• Play
• Teaching & support
• Theories & approaches

You can also search all of the clips with either a key word search, or choose from subjects in the search list.

It’s easy to identify appropriate examples to match the focus of planned development sessions, be it a particular age group, child development area, a specific theory or learning strategy.

Many of the videos appear in more than one category, exploiting their multidimensional characteristics.

Tailored training sessions

Tailoring sessions, using the videos with their observation points, reflection discussions and action planning, enables the generation of powerful and effective times of learning.

The library lets you focus in very directly to particular points, generating discussion, joint observation and assessment within your teams. The prompt questions provided are very useful for guiding observation without predefining the outcomes. Training is most effective when the learning points come directly from the participants and the clip library encourages this self-directed group learning.

Using the clip library makes it a lot easier to have more frequent, shorter and more sharply focused training sessions. You can easily return to any of the individual short clips to reassess and highlight learning points, allowing for more targeted support and the ability to assess impact. Your selection of clips can be saved and reorganised for particular training sessions so your favourite clips and sessions will always be to hand.

An example training session

As an example: A training session focusing on aspects of practice outdoors could consist of a number of clips, tailored to the needs of various groups. There could be a different focus matched to the experience level of team members by the inclusion or exclusion of individual clips.

Group discussion can also be guided from the general to the more specific, maybe considering the wide potential of the outdoors environment for risk taking, gross motor skills, physical activities, emotional development, through to the role of the adult in supporting critical thinking:- scaffolding children’s creativity, their use of imagination and problem solving.

Perhaps you can feed this through to consider the interests of your current cohort of children, showing how observation, assessment and planning could enhance provision in the coming weeks to raise expectations of your children’s next steps and achievements.

Build your own learning modules quickly, efficiently and cost effectively

So, the clip library provides building blocks to enable providers and organisations to create their own training resources, tailored to specific needs and context, allowing even the smallest setting to build their own learning modules quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.