Early Childhood Seminars
Joy and Pete have been travelling and providing workshops across Australia and New Zealand for years; we are constantly meeting with and enthusing early childhood staff and are often booked up to a year in advance.
We are finding with the recession, the industry is looking for value in their staff Professional Development programmes. It is far cheaper for all staff to come to an evening or whole day session than to be given a day off on full pay (plus expense of relief staff) as well as travel and accommodation when attending something in the city.
Joy retired in September 2005 from full time work after being the Director of Kingfisher Preschool in Wagga Wagga for nearly 2 years after 24 years as Director CSU Campus Preschools.
She is a writer/singer-songwriter. Here is a list of her work so far. Play, Dance, Sing With Young Children [Music CD] and Teacher Notes - From Observation to Reflection: A practitioner’s guide to programme planning & documentation - Pancakes and Red Buckets: Creating and Emergent Curriculum with Children Aged Birth to Five Years – Preschool Math[with Bob Williams and Debra Cunningham] – Visions of Creativity: Connecting Theory, Practice and Reflection – Music CD Wombats in the Belfry and her original publication with Bebe Jarratt Building Walls of Wombats.
In 2006 we wrote and produced - From Observation to Reflection: A practitioner’s guide to programme planning and documentation! - this is a complete guide to observing, using digital photos and the why and how to write it up in MS Word. This was undated in 2008 for the latest version of MS Word. This assists practitioners to create a very readable journal and portfolio - viewed by the children, parents, family as well as staff and regulatory persons. Truly an excellent way to document the whole year.
This topic is much sought after in workshops around Australia and at the National EC conference in Rotorua NZ 2009, Joy presented 2 workshops to a very keen 
audience. A workshop with an expected 180 participants ended up with 250!
In 2007 we wrote and produced Pancakes and Red Buckets: Creating an Emergent Curriculum with Children Aged Birth to Five Years. This was in response to the questions asked in workshops about documentation. - Is an emergent curriculum suitable for children under 3? What is the difference between a day book and a learning journal? What is an emergent curriculum and how can we construct one? There is a workshop/seminar that covers this material. It can be easily combined with a morning workshop about observation and documentation or it can stand alone.
Joy and Team Henderson and others recorded a new CD in December 2005 and it was on sale in January 2006. Joy wrote a 44 A4 page Teacher’s Notes to accompany the CD. It has instructions how to play piano and guitar chords as well as words and chords for the songs. Joy has also added suggestions to make good use of a song as a starting place for emergent ideas.
Preschool Math [Gryphon House USA] with Dr. Bob Williams and Debra Cunningham was released in May 2005, it is a wonderful resource for math concepts and science. Joy says, 'I am really excited about the Preschool Math. It was a labour of love combining such interesting different approaches into a fantastic whole. It makes maths fun and very practical for people who may sometimes be intimidated by maths as a topic". We have a lot of fun in math [and sometimes combined with science] seminars. Some seminars we concentrate on wooden project blocks and train tracks as maths materials, in other this is combined with stones, satin ribbons, dance, song, and sometimes simple art materials.
Her most recent work Visions of Creativity: Connecting Theory, Practice and Reflection from Pademelon Press was launched December 2008 and is already a bestselling item from
this publisher. It has recently been picked up by Redleaf Press USA and
will come out as a version especially for the USA market. This is very exciting news. Seminars on the topic of creativity are starting to become increasingly popular.
Joy finds it a delight to come into contact with previous CSU students she taught when she was a part-time academic working as a distance education lecturer for CSU; she feels this keeps her in touch with a number of issues emerging from the field. This last year she has been invited to write two subjects for Ballarat University and so far we have had excellent reviews from students and those teaching the subjects.
She is passionate about the emergent curriculum and has been on a journey of discovery about the ideas coming from Reggio Emilia in an Australian context. She is also fascinated by Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligence and the implications of these provocations in the lives of young children.
She is also interested and experienced in most of the curriculum areas, especially the arts, [painting, drawing, clay, music, dance and drama] as well as early literacy and storytelling, science and maths. She is interested in the ideas that emerge from the NSW Curriculum Framework. She encourages reflection about what we do as well as presenting hands-on experiences for adults working with young children. She is entertaining and at times cheeky!
Her approach is from the classroom and she uses stories and pictures to illustrate ideas and challenges, a comment made was that Joy has a whole of centre approach rather than zeroing in a particular issue, the effect is that people understand the holistic workshop far better and can take the concepts away and use them.
View the Our Seminars page for information about workshops and seminars we can provide.