Early Years and Visual Arts Development Commission - Early Years Consultants

The Story of Little Creatives

Inspire secured Arts Council funding to develop early years visual arts. In 2018 early years specialist consultants were commissioned to train a team of five artists. The artists worked to adapt their arts practice to be suitable for the early years. They went on to deliver workshops in early years settings and libraries with families to test and improve the offer as a piece of action research.

A programme of Little Creatives workshops for children aged from 2 -5 resulted and the team have been working creatively to help early years' children learn new skills and have multi-sensory creative experiences since.

The current Little Creatives workshop programme ended in March 2023.

More information can be found here: Little Creatives project page

What we want:

We are looking for early years expert(s) to devise a training/mentoring programme for five visual artists. The programme will inform them about early years approaches and educational development. It will enable the artists to develop their individual practice so they can deliver creative visual art workshops for the early years. The training will:

Be based on the best practice and ethos of early years education
Explore the early years’ curriculum and its relationship with the creative process
Explore strategies and skills for engaging very young children and their families
Explore physical and learning developmental milestones and identify activities that will help children achieve them
Stimulate creativity
Provide feedback and mentoring at explorative artist led workshop sessions with groups

The training programme will ideally be in September 2023 and can be a combination of in person and online sessions. In person activity will take place in library settings in different Nottinghamshire districts, to be decided.

For information our libraries are listed here: Our Libraries | Inspire - Culture, Learning, Libraries (inspireculture.org.uk)