The Northamptonshire Baby Room Project
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What is it?
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The manuals
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News
The aim of The Northamptonshire Baby Room Project© is to raise the quality of babies’ experiences by creating a fun, sustainable and an exciting project that enlightens practitioners and parents about their baby’s brain development & empowers practitioners working with young infants to be confident and passionate about their vital work. How people play and interact with babies is key to growing physically and emotionally healthy babies.
'The needs of all children in their early years can be summed up quite simply – the need for affection and nurturing care from adults who are responsive, kind and loving.’
Maria Robinson (2009) Foreword to The Northamptonshire Baby Room Project©
The challenge
To create an imaginative, informed project inspiring practitioners to change their practice using knowledge about baby brain development, observation and interaction.
The sessions
Multi-disciplinary team delivered three sessions themed around baby brain development:
• Babies' brain development
• Babies' emotional wellbeing
• Babies' playing and laughing
Sessions designed to balance information sharing; making resources and immediate input from the multi-disciplinary team.
The manuals
'Babies don't do anything, do they?'
We want to challenge this view of babies. We want people to be amazed at what a powerful organ a baby’s brain is and how every experience a baby has shapes their brain and raise the quality of provision.
Through the Northamptonshire Baby Room Project© we wanted practitioners and parents to understand that the brain grows all the time, even during sleep. We wanted them to become more in tune with babies by noticing where they looked, how they may feel and understand how simple hand made ideas bring fantastic rewards.
What babies crave is interaction, they crave people playing with them, aptly communicating with them, being interested in them and loving them.
‘The brain is flexible, sensitive and malleable. It is deeply influenced by the opportunities in the outside world.’ Gopnick (2001)
Read more about how the Northamptonshire Baby Room Project is helping babies learn»
