In last week’s blog post I shared some thoughts about valuing the curriculum-making experiences that all children participate in with their families. This is central to building a school/setting-based curriculum that connects with children’s lives at home and enables every child to participate in meaningful educational experiences. Children’s interests can provide a powerful bridge to connect curriculum-making at home and in settings. However, this requires us to move beyond surface level interpretations of the term ‘children’s interests’. As Helen Hedges (2022, page 3) argues,

‘We owe it to children to look more deeply at their motivations and learning….favourite pursuits provide windows into children’s efforts to make sense and meaning from their life experiences with other children and adults, and learning opportunities in their families and communities. These efforts involve multiple ongoing inquiries into, and questions about, these life experiences.’

Helen’s words resonate with our approach to understanding children’s interests as valuable forms and sources of curriculum making. For example, in a recent project funded by the Froebel Trust we* collaborated with families and practitioners in a multi-diverse early years settings to generate deep understandings of the interests that children were exploring in their play. We used the concept of Funds of Knowledge (González, Moll and Amanti, 2005) as a tool for thinking about how interests might be stimulated by children’s participation in family activities and extended through curriculum making with practitioners.