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  Effective practice
Exploration and Investigation
 
  • Help children to notice and discuss patterns around them, for example, rubbings from grates, covers, or bricks.
  • Encourage children to raise questions and suggest solutions and answers.
  • Examine change over time, for example, growing plants, and change that may be reversed, for example, melting ice.
Designing and Making
 
  • Discuss purposes of design and making tasks.
  • Teach joining, measuring, cutting and finishing techniques and their names.
  • Encourage children's evaluations, helping them to use words to explain, such as 'longer', 'shorter', 'lighter'.
ICT
 
  • Teach and encourage children to click on different icons to cause things to happen in a computer program.
  • Ensure safe use of all ICT apparatus and make appropriate risk assessments for their use.
Time
 
  • Sequence events, for example, photographs of children from birth.
  • Use stories that introduce a sense of time and people from the past.
  • Encourage children to ask questions about events in each other's lives in discussions, and explore these experiences in role-play.
  • Compare artefacts of different times, for example, garden and household tools.
  • Make the most of opportunities to value children's histories. Involve families in sharing memories. This might include celebration of a travelling background or of African-Caribbean roots.
Place
 
  • Use appropriate words, for example, 'town', 'village', 'road', 'path', 'house', 'flat', 'temple' and 'synagogue', to help children make distinctions in their observations.
  • Help children to find out about the environment by talking to people, examining photographs and simple maps and visiting local places.
  • Encourage children to express opinions on natural and built environments and give opportunities for them to hear different points of view on the quality of the environment.
  • Ensure all children have opportunities to express themselves and learn the vocabulary to talk about their surroundings, drawing on and encouraging the home language to support the learning of English.
  • Encourage the use of words that help children to express opinions, for example, 'busy', 'quiet' and 'pollution'.
Communities
 
  • Introduce children to a range of cultures and religions, for example, tell stories, listen to music, dance and eat foods from a range of cultures. Use resources in role-play that reflect a variety of cultures, such as clothes, symbols, candles and toys.
  • Extend children's knowledge of cultures within and beyond the setting through books, videos and DVDs, and photographs; listening to simple short stories in various languages; handling artefacts; inviting visitors from a range of religious and ethnic groups, and visiting local places of worship and cultural centres.
  • Ensure that any cultural assumptions and stereotypes that are already held are countered in activities.