One of our regular TOY blog contributors is Eilish Balfe, from Happy Days Early Years Service, Ireland. In this blog she describes the creative strategies the children and residents in the local nursing home have been using this past year to maintain their friendships.
Mary Renck Jalongo and Patricia Crawford, co-editors of the newly published book ‘Intergenerational Bonds. The Contributions of older adults to young children’s lives‘ (Springer) engage in a wide-ranging discussion with Margaret Kernan, co-coordinator of TOY. The interview covers the current status of IGL in education scholarship and teaching, the role of children’s literature in promoting IGL and the importance of volunteering in IGL practice.
Community and public spaces can serve as rich and innovative learning environments for children by using intergenerational learning (IGL) as a pedagogical strategy. This was a key finding of a recent PhD study about IGL in early childhood education (ECE) services in Ireland conducted by Dr. Anne Fitzpatrick. The study demonstrates how IGL offers a contemporary take on a long-established belief that it takes a village to raise a child.
“Before the programme at my school I thought my place was pretty boring, I didn’t know a lot about nature but now I think differently. I think my place is amazing and I’m lucky to live here”. These are the views of one of the young participants in the Burrenbeo initiatives.
Based on the west coast of Ireland, Burrenbeo Trust is an independent charity which aims to connect all of us to our places and help to identify our role in caring for these places.
How can creative workshops involving lots of play and physical contact between young and old be reimagined for COVID times? This is exactly what PER TERRA IL CIELO (the sky on earth), an intergenerational theatre workshop project in the North of Italy, has achieved over the past 6 months. The theatre workshop is the creation of actor Anna Fascendini.