Child-sized Furniture

At VIP childcare we aim to provide a safe, stimulating environment for all our children and in unison we all strive to be a centre of excellence. To go that extra mile in our baby provision we have revised our equipment and feel we can enhance the room layout by replacing our oversized mealtime furniture with low level inclusive mealtime tables and chairs. The idea to revise our mealtime furniture came from an exchange programme in which two of our practitioners participated in where they were able to collate data first hand of a setting that provided child sized and friendly furniture.

In addition to the mealtime improvements we have established a need to provide a way where our under one’s and over one’s could interact during free flow play and to do this we have invested in low level play tables which encourage our range of ages to interact and connect on their own level.

The baby team had a planning meeting to discuss the room layout and gather first hand opinions from each member on the areas under review and to brainstorm and collate ideas on how we can enhance each area. Research was carried out to find the options available to meet our objectives and as a team we created a wish list which was presented to our board and fortunately it was approved for us to go forward - a great advantage to being a Social enterprise, ability to reinvest.

As a team we feel that this overview of our room design and room flow has shown success almost immediately where we can see the enhanced engagements between our children whilst interacting at the play tables or communicating at the round table. In relation to our mealtimes the child friendly layout creates a much more effective routine where our older children require less help and our youngest are included in the circular design, feeling part of the group in comparison to being at different levels i.e. in the high chairs separate from meal table.