Michelle PrattCreating environments that maximise learning is deliberately deciding to create inspirational spaces. Putting it into practice is the magic, and watching children fully immerse themselves into a world of wonder and joy resulting from what you’ve created, is enlightening.
Are you an early years centre manager, educator or parent looking to create more meaningful spaces and experiences for children? Do you need help finding inspiration to keep up with current trends and best practices?
What if you had a visual platform to help create early years environments that enhance children’s development and learning?
Well, now you do; Enspirement.
What is Enspirement?
Enspirement aims to transform the early years' experience through meaningful environmental design, defending childhood wonder, and inspiring The Potential Place.
Enspirement is a global community that shares its creativity and knowledge to better the lives of children globally. Enspirement offers a positive way to engage with each other, share inspirational content, and spark creativity and innovation, resulting in more fulfilling environments for children with better learning outcomes. We will connect you to a global community of peers, experts, and thought leaders and provide an opportunity for you to grow your thinking and expand your circle of professional connections.
Enspirement ticks both boxes in a fun, visual, creative way.
“Emotions are the foundation for learning and, therefore, must be the cornerstone of design for early childhood learning environments.”
Dr. Sandra Duncan – author of The Potential Place framework.
Enspirement is underpinned by a new framework for designing emotion-focused early years environments approaching the intersection of the child (inner/ emotions) and the learning environment (outer/ learning space).
To deliver our community with the inspiration you require to create The Potential Place in your setting, we have developed three components to our platform:
1. ENSPIRE
Browse our gallery of inspirational imagery. As you set the parameters, Enspirement will filter images, so you see the most relevant content. Save, share, collaborate, and develop your ideas while connecting with and inspiring others within the community.
What is an Enspire?
An Enspire is a collection of images, descriptions, and potential product tags linked to the e-Commerce store that provide children with emotion-focused environments or activities that will, in turn, give better learning or care outcomes.
An Enspire visually communicates and shares an idea that will inspire and educate others within the community. The description and filters give greater insight into the Enspire, stepping other members through the creation process –
- What is the experience or environment shared,
- Why was it created,
- What made it successful, and
- What could be or was done next to further children's learning.
Enspire descriptions could also explore observations of play, interactions between the educators and children, and the educators' role in enabling the child to get the most from this experience.
Enspires will share ideas on using your brought resources and inspire you to collect, find, and recycle objects around you.
Be inspired to improve, extend, and bring new levels of creativity to your environments.
Save and share Enspires
By creating a free account with Enspirement, you can save the Enspire to your Lookbook or share it with friends or colleagues to inspire each other and build galleries for future reference or development.
Collaborating on Lookbooks with your colleagues will align your pedagogy and rejuvenate your practices as a team.
Click here to view this Autumn Table Enspire.
2. LEARN
Multiple learning opportunities are at your fingertips, including blogs, articles, webinars, and Q&A sessions. Tap into our community of thought-leaders for content relevant to your professional development.
3. SOURCE
Encouraging sustainable purchasing habits is essential in early childhood education to model this behaviour for future generations. We have carefully curated resources that are high quality, safe to use, and support better learning outcomes for children. Products are linked to Enspires to show how to use these resources in diverse ways and combine these with repurposed, reused, and recycled objects to create open-ended experiences for children with exceptional learning outcomes.
Enspirement uses four categories to filter and refine your content
Spatial Conditions of Emotions
Use this filter to search by the spatial condition of emotion you are interested in implementing.
Directories
Use this filter to refine the areas of care or play relevant to you. By selecting none of the directories, you will see all available content.
- Block Play
- Dramatic Play
- Expressive Arts
- Discovery
- Care Routines
- Outdoor Play
- Spatial Design
Woven Concepts
Use this filter to refine the concepts or themes naturally woven through the directories. By selecting none of the woven concepts, you will see all the content available.
- Communication
- Mathematics
- Technology
- Music
- Sustainability
- Nature
- Sensory Development
- Imagination
- Gross Motor
- Fine Motor
- Cooperative Play
- Individual Play
- Sense of Belonging
- Understanding the World
- Wellbeing
- Home-based
Age Group
- 0-18 months
- 18-36 months
- 36 months - 6 years
- 6 years +
“Children are miracles. Believing that every child is a miracle can transform the way we design for children’s care. When we invite a miracle into our lives, we prepare ourselves and the environment around us. We may set out flowers or special offerings. We may cleanse ourselves, the space, or our thoughts of everything but the love inside us. We make it our job to create with reverence and gratitude a space that is worthy of a miracle. Action follows thought. We can choose to change. We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums.”
Anita Rui Olds, 1999
Whether at home or in a group care setting, early childhood environments disproportionately affect how children feel, engage, discover, think, and learn (more on this here). To make a positive impact in the lives of educators and children through environmental design, we have to do it right.
Creating emotion-based early learning experiences deepens a child’s desire to learn and be curious about the world.
Environments that spark wonder, creativity, and discovery involve thinking and planning. With Enspirement, thinking and planning are effortless. You get visual inspiration on a beautifully organised platform, and it brings early years communities together to share knowledge, expand thinking, and improve the environmental design of early childhood settings.
Ready to get started? We’ll see you there!
Watch the video below for a quick introduction to how Enspirement works.
Chloe Forsman
