Webinar Recordings

Explore our growing library of webinars featuring leading voices from across the Early Years sector.

Each session offers practical insights, reflective prompts and evidence‑informed strategies to support your work with children and families.

Whether you’re revisiting a session or catching up for the first time, this space brings expert learning straight to you.

Use this collection to inspire your practice, explore new ideas and stay connected with sector‑wide conversations!

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Children are naturally drawn to ramps, quickly experimenting with height, speed and movement using whatever materials are available. What’s often overlooked is the rich mathematical thinking and language that emerges through this simple, joyful play.

This session introduces the Ramp Play booklet, developed through the Young Minds Big Maths project with early years educators and university mathematicians. Drawing on real observations of 3‑ and 4‑year‑olds, the booklet reveals the surprising maths in ramp play and offers practical ways to notice and nurture it in your setting.

The ramp play booklet is a guide for practitioners, designed to help them explore maths through ramp play. It contains lots of examples of children’s play, reflections from practitioners, insights from mathematicians, and practical things like new words to introduce and advice on getting started.

Guest speakers:

• Rachel Oughton & Sophy Darwin, Mathematicians from Durham University

• Kathryn Nichols & Sarah Dixon-Jones from Houghton Community Nursery School

Want to get a copy of the Ramp Play booklet for your team? 

You can download a PDF copy of the Ramp Play booklet for free, directly from Young Minds Big Maths.

We also have lots of printed copies of the Ramp Play Booklet to share with settings and schools across Birmingham. They are available to collect from: 

• Jakeman Nursery School 

• Adderley Nursery School 

• Osborne Nursery School 

Our Early Education Advisor team will also have copies of the booklet available at in-person network meetings, or you can request a copy directly via email: info@birminghamearlyyearsnetworks.org

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In this 90-minute webinar, Debi covers:

- How loose parts and found materials can be used by babies, toddlers and young children as a material to ‘think and express/communicate’ with.

- How to curate and organise loose parts and found objects (inside and out) that maximise and amplify learning potential.

- The theory of loose parts and how this relates to creative thinking, language and communication and principles of practice in the early years.

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Professor Tina Bruce (CBE) and Professor Chris Pascal (OBE) lead this session on reflective pedagogy with a focus on the Power and Pleasures of Play.

They share their recent research with the Froebel Trust, which developed a tool called Reflection with Guidance. This tool is described, and they then introduce a key element of the tool, focusing our reflections on the deep importance of play and how we can observe and see this in children’s explorations from their earliest days of life.

They also introduce the Layers of Play Framework, a resource to support practitioners in ‘play-full analysis’ of young children, and use video clips of children in play to enable participants to try out the framework for themselves.

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Related materials

Blog - Loose Parts as an Activator of Learning in the Early Years

Blog - The Power and Pleasures of Play