In the reception unit we are entering a period of change! We strive to provide the best opportunities for our children, but have begun to question the way that we plan, and what we actually teach the children. Are we catering for their learning needs, or are we enforcing our own ideas and teaching them things that we think they will like?
We began to think about this process back in the autumn term, when we took an opportunity to ask the children what they would like to learn about. This culminated in lots of enthusiastic voices with a keen interest in space and all things alien. From this we planned a topic about space and took the children on a fantastic trip to the National Space Centre, where they could gaze in awe and wonder at the rockets and planets, and meet Astronaut George. This was a successful topic, but it did result in hours of teacher-prepared plans directing the children in what we thought they might enjoy. We wanted to delve even deeper into the minds of our children and look closely at what they enjoyed doing each day, and how we could move them forward in their thinking.
We realised that to truly cater for the children's interests we needed to use our observations of them to plan our activities from what captivates them at that point in time. This means moving away from the comfort of well laid-out plans for topics lasting several weeks, with resources provided and objectives documented, to taking our observations and providing enhancements that have real meaning to children at the time.
We are moving away from team brainstorming sessions for one staff member to interpret and produce detailed plans, to all the team being involved in planning on a weekly basis, providing activities the children are interested in. We will no longer have a 'topic' on which to hang our objectives, but hope to be able to provide children with the opportunities they need, when they need them.