@Lweji
@LooneyLovefood
Have you studied child development? Of course it’s not about travelling on a bus or visiting a shop specifically, but it is about early socialisation and a broad-brush understanding of how the wider world works - having a variety of different experiences in different settings prior to starting school.
There has long been an issue with children not being ‘school-ready’ when they start Reception. Prior to Covid screens and busy parents not talking to their children were often blamed for this; in particular there was a crisis in speech and language skills because both parents and children were spending more time on screens rather than interacting with each other.
Now, as I mentioned upthread, we have an additional issue, where (unless things change dramatically) much of the Early Years curriculum is built on the assumption that children will have had some basic early experiences of things like visiting shops, cafes and libraries, travelling on different modes of transport, that post-Covid they may well not have done.
So, if you’re teaching about number bonds or counting, you might do that in the context of supermarket shopping, or ordering in a cafe. You wouldn’t expect to have to explain what a supermarket was, or what you did there - that existing knowledge would be assumed.
It’s like when I had to teach a KS1 unit on ‘The Seaside’ to a class in an inner-city school where half the kids had never seen the sea. It was a hell of a lot harder from that starting point and the outcomes were ultimately worse than when I taught the same unit at a leafy suburban school a couple of years later, where the children were taken on regular day trips to the seaside and had summer holidays in Menorca. Essentially it’s what’s known as ‘cultural capital’.
There’s also the communication, language and socialisation angle - meeting people in a variety of different contexts, adapting your behaviour to fit the context, learning how to speak to a range of adults and respond with social niceties such as ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’. Many preschoolers aren’t getting much of this at the moment, which will have a knock-on effect when they start school.
I have a 3-year-old DD myself and I’ve used every single opportunity I can over the last year to make sure she’s been exposed to as many settings and experiences as possible - where it’s been open and we’ve been allowed, we’ve been there. But I realise we’re lucky, and that lots of people are unable to do this for financial, time or medical reasons.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble and I’m aware this is essentially a thread about taking children into supermarkets, but I hope it makes some sort of sense.