Celebrating a year of creative play with early years settings in Bristol

Published on 4 June 2025.

Over the last year we’ve been working closely with early years settings in Bristol, delivering creative play sessions and beginning research and development for a new theatre show for early years.

Our relationship with Little Hayes Nursery began during our tour of Igloo and Creative Play sessions in January-February 2024, a performance for 0-3 year olds and their carers. We reserved an allocation of tickets for children and staff from the nursery to attend the performance at Oldbury Court Children’s Centre in Bristol.

Igloo highlighted the value of creative play with our independent evaluation and early years professionals reporting the performance and stay and play having a positive impact on children’s language development and wellbeing.

Little Lights – an early years pilot project

Following on from Igloo, we developed an early years pilot project, Little Lights, which was delivered in June and July 2024 in collaboration with Little Hayes Nursery in Fishponds and Hartcliffe Nursery and Children’s Centre.

This project developed from creative conversations stimulated from Igloo and particularly the creative play session that immediately followed the performance.

Each Little Lights session started with a creative provocation that the children were free to respond to in their own way. The aim was to then closely observe their interests and use this information to plan future provocations by following the children’s lead.

Building on our evaluation and learnings from our tour of Igloo, the Little Lights pilot project further demonstrated the positive impact and value of child led creative play in early years.

Mike Akers, our Early Years lead, discusses how we approached the sessions and what we’ve learnt so far:

“As facilitators we are focussed on listening to the children and learning from them what direction they want their own journey through the day's activity to be. We are learning from them by listening to their stories. Working in close collaboration with staff we are observing how creative provocations can allow children to show different aspects of themselves, to develop confidence, help support focus and attention, as well as providing opportunities to communicate with adults and other children in ways that are enabling for their speech, language and communication development.”

Light Up Language

We have continued to develop our work with early years through Light Up Language – a 3-year project funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Light Up Language is exploring how drama techniques can be used to support and develop children’s oracy (speaking and listening) skills from the earliest possible stage, by engaging drama practitioners with early years settings and primary schools.

Through this project, we are continuing our relationship with Little Hayes and Speedwell Nurseries, along with Cashmore Nursery in Barton Hill, delivering weekly creative sessions throughout year 1 of the project.

Mike Akers, our Early Years Lead, reflects on a special moment from the sessions so far:

“There have been many moments of joy, connection and learning throughout. Yesterday for example, two children who are largely pre-verbal were playing together exploring some paper cups. One of them put a hole in the bottom of the cup with a pen, then carefully experimented and successfully removed the bottom of the cup to make a tube. She began making noises down the tube and the other child listened to these by putting the other end of the tube up to her ear. They took it in turns doing this and the second child developed the sounds into a song with a melody, along the lines of 'dee di doo di la la la.'

I helped others make singing tubes like this and soon there were several of us joining in with the second child's tune, which you could see was very affirming for her. By now the first child had moved on and was very carefully cutting the paper cup up into tiny pieces. The second child wanted to follow suit, but was not so comfortable with using the scissors. She offered me the cup and scissors and said 'Can you cut it please - this.' This was the first time I had heard her speak during the time I have been at nursery and it was wonderful during that session to hear her voice.”

Developing a new early years show

This April, we began research and development (R&D) for a new early years show, with local children and their families in Barton Hill playing and testing ideas with Travelling Light artists in the Travelling Light studio.

For the next stage of R&D, in May we visited Speedwell Nursery to develop and test the creative play elements of the offer within an early years setting – exploring what opportunities and challenges this provides.

This case study is an example of Travelling Light’s different ways of engaging with children and early years settings over time.

The children and staff at Little Hayes and Speedwell Nurseries have been on a creative journey with us. They started with enjoying Igloo as audience members, then exploring stories and developing their communication and self-expression through creative play as part of Little Lights and Light Up Language. Now they are helping us to explore ideas with artists to create new work for early years audiences.

We are looking forward to the next steps in developing our early years work and the many moments of laughter, play and creativity it will bring.