Hello and welcome!
My name is Anna and I am a primary school teacher from the UK with a specialism in early years education and art. I taught for nearly 10 years in a large inner-city primary school as the head of early years and art and was a lead early years teacher for the local borough, helping newer teachers.
Now I am enjoying staying home full time looking after my three daughters, who for the purposes of this blog are nicknamed Cakie, Pop and Bean. I am expecting baby number 4 in January 2015! Life at home with the kids all day can be totally exhausting, but I try and remind myself of the real privilege to be able to spend these formative years with my children.
I first started this site as a way to channel some of my frustrated creativity and to satisfy my twitchiness to get back to teaching.
Some of my friends were keen for me to share play and craft ideas that I was doing at home so I enjoyed challenging myself to come up with a few different things a week to post on here.
Since then, I have met some wonderful early childhood educators and artistic parents through running this blog and I’m privileged to have so many new readers visit each month. Every comment spurs me on to post more so I thank you for the encouragement! This blog has now become my work-from-home occupation and I’m thrilled to be able to stay with my kids while doing something I love at the same time.
We are a Christian family and place a central importance on raising our children following God’s plan for our lives in the Bible.
A note to anyone who thinks this site represents the whole of our life at home- it doesn’t! We don’t rise at dawn to play and craft and bake and sing. We don’t even do activities and crafts for a large percentage of the day, maybe an hour or so squeezed in between play groups, mums meet ups, outings to the park, watching Peppa Pig on repeat and of course the obligatory Sainsbury’s shop. We have our fair sure of drawing on the walls, tantrums and pyjama days. I love to be creative and this has been a wonderful way of retaining my sanity!
Please feel free to browse the archives, make a comment, sign up to follow the posts and come back again. I hope you will be inspired to play and create with your children and see how easy it can be.
If you are new here please read this one fundamental and favourite post which is very close to my heart called The Central Importance of Play.
Thank You!
You can contact me at anna.ranson@yahoo.co.uk
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