Learning Journals and special books have grown in popularity over the last decade, offering early years’ settings a way to record the special moments of their children, and to keep parent/carers involved in a partnership as their children blossom and grow. More recently they have been used in conjunction with the EYFS developmental stages to assess more formally how children are progressing.

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Traditionally these individual records have been collected in scrapbooks or folders, building up into a treasured memoir that children can take with them when they leave for the next stages of their journey through life - each entry forming a thread in the warp and weft of the tapestry that is their life.

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Charley Barleys has found a way that parent/carers are able to view and comment on their child’s special moments, and will be able to contribute their own stories of the child's life outside of the setting. We create records of observations instantly, add notes and images and have them immediately available to any authorised person as part of the complete story of the child's life at nursery.

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This is what we call Tapestry. Online Learning Journals, from the creators of the Foundation Stage Forum. 

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Tapestry is a web application allowing the managers, to create and maintain learning journeys and 'special books' for the children in our setting. It features:

• A complete standalone application with our own web address, with full management functions to control access and communication, for parent/carers and staff, and editorial control over all journals and records.

• Journals created for each of our children, with full control over who can view and edit them.

• Each observation or page can include notes, photographs and EYFS assessments, characteristics of learning and videos. They can be enhanced by comments from other staff and parent/carers, and each page appears in a pleasing and coherent way.

• View the complete set of observations as a learning journey, flipping through a single child's observation pages, in time-order, or filtering in flexible ways to access our favourite records. Bookmark favourites for quick access.

• Convert to PDF for parent/carers to print hardcopies as appropriate.

• Observations can be uploaded in one single process that makes a new entry immediately available or, optionally, hidden until the manager has approved them.

• Each child's journey can have individual accounts set up for parent/carers and relatives to access.

• Parent/carers can comment on new entries and even add their own.

• Mobile apps allow new entries to be made from iphones and ipads (available now) and other devices (coming soon).

• Intuitive EYFS 'tagger' allows assessments to be made down to statement level, and multiple EYFS assessments can be made for a single observation.

• Automatic emails generated for parent/cares when new entries are made.

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All children attending Charley Barleys will have a personal online learning journal which records photos, observations and comments, in line with the Early Years Foundation Stage, to build up a record of your child’s experiences during their time with us. In addition to viewing our contributions, we encourage parents to add to it by uploading photos and comments, or commenting on observations made by us.