Give time for children to pursue their learning without interruption, and to return to activities.
Provide experiences and activities that are challenging but achievable.
Plan regular short periods when individuals listen to others, such as singing a short song, sharing an experience or describing something they have seen or done.
Putting the blocks away - In a nursery school, a small group of children work independently, together, and with the support of the practitioner to tidy away the resources.
[transcript]
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Making music - In a reception class, the practitioner and a group of children work out different rhythms using percussion instruments. [transcript]
You can watch the video, via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.
Self-confidence and Self-esteem
Make a display with the children, showing all the people who make up the 'community' of the setting.
Plan circle times when children can have an opportunity to talk about their feelings and support them by providing props, such as a sad puppet, that can be used to show how they feel.
Keep a diary with children, and refer to it from time to time to help them recall when they were happy, when they were excited, or when they felt lonely.
Collect information that helps children to understand why people do things differently from each other, and encourage children to talk about these differences.
Share stories that reflect the diversity of children's experiences.
Making Relationships
Provide activities that involve turn-taking and sharing.
Involve children in agreeing codes of behaviour and taking responsibility for implementing them.
Behaviour and Self-control
Make time to listen to children respectfully when they raise injustices, and involve them in finding a 'best fit' solution.
Provide books with stories about characters that follow or break rules, and the effects of their behaviour on others.
Affirm and praise positive behaviour, explaining that it makes children and adults feel happier.
Encourage children to think about issues from the viewpoint of others.
Explaining the rules - In a reception class, a practitioner supports a child to discuss what has upset her and help her understand the need for boundaries. [transcript]
You can watch the video via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.
Self-care
Provide opportunities for self-chosen activities, and for choices within adult-initiated activities.
Sense of Community
Give children opportunities to be curious, enthusiastic, engaged and tranquil, so developing a sense of inner-self and peace.
Ensure that all children are given support to participate in discussions and to be listened to.
Provide additional resources including interpreter support for children learning English as an additional language.
Communication, Language and Literacy
Planning and resourcing
Language for Communication
Give time for children to initiate discussions from shared experiences and have conversations with each other.
Give thinking time for children to decide what they want to say and how they will say it.
Set up collaborative tasks, for example, construction, food activities or story-making through role-play. Help children to talk about and plan how they will begin, what parts each will play and what materials they will need.
Provide opportunities for talking for a wide range of purposes, for example, to present ideas to others as descriptions, explanations, instructions or justifications, and to discuss and plan individual or shared activities.
Foster children's enjoyment of spoken and written language by providing interesting and stimulating play opportunities.
Provide word banks and writing resources for both indoor and outdoor play.
Resource role-play areas with listening and writing equipment and provide easy access to word banks.
Provide opportunities for children to participate in meaningful speaking and listening activities. For example, taking models that they have made to show children in another class and explaining how they were made.
Writing a letter - In a nursery class, children explore writing materials, commenting on the marks they have made. [transcript]
You can watch the video via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.
Language for Thinking
Set up displays that remind children of what they have experienced, using objects, artefacts, photographs and books.
Provide for, initiate and join in imaginative play and role-play, encouraging children to talk about what is happening and to act out the scenarios in character.
Linking Sounds and Letters
Ensure that role-play areas encourage writing of signs with a real purpose, for example, a pet shop.
Plan fun activities and games that help children create rhyming strings of real and imaginary words, for example, Maddie, daddy, baddie, laddie.
When practitioners judge that children are ready to begin a programme of systematic phonic work they should refer to the guidance on the EYFS CD-ROM, which can be found in areas of Learning and Development: Communication, Language and Literacy: Early Reading.
This will support practitioners working in the EYFS and beyond to start teaching the phonic knowledge and skills children need to be able to recognise words and read them with fluency by the end of KS1. Practitioners need to make principled professional judgements as to when individual children are ready to start such work. For most children this will be by the age of five.
Reading
When practitioners judge that children are ready to begin a programme of systematic phonic work they should refer to the guidance on the EYFS CD-ROM which can be found in areas of Learning and Development: Communication, Language and Literacy: Early Reading. This will support practitioners working in the EYFS and beyond to start teaching the phonic knowledge and skills children need to be able to recognise words and read them with fluency by the end of KS1. Practitioners need to make principled professional judgements as to when individual children are ready to start such work. For most children this will be by the age of five.
Encourage children to add to their first-hand experience of the world through the use of books, other texts and information, and information and communication technology (ICT).
Provide story boards and props which encourage children to talk about the sequence of events and characters in a story.
Provide story sacks and boxes for use in the setting and at home.
Provide varied texts and encourage children to use their phonics knowledge to recognise words.
Provide some simple texts which children can decode to give them confidence and to practise their developing skills.
Provide picture books, books with flaps or hidden words, books with accompanying CDs or tapes, and story sacks.
Writing
Provide materials and opportunities for children to use writing in their play, and create purposes for independent and group writing.
Plan occasions where you can involve children in organising writing, for example, putting recipe instructions in the right order.
Provide word banks and other resources for segmenting and blending to support children to use their phonic knowledge.
Handwriting
Provide a variety of writing tools and paper, indoors and outdoors.
Give children practice in forming letters correctly, for example, labelling their work, making cards and writing notices.
Provide opportunities to write meaningfully, for example, by placing notepads by phones or having appointment cards in the role-play doctor's surgery.
Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy
Planning and resourcing
Numbers as Labels and for Counting
Provide collections of interesting things for children to sort, order, count and label in their play.
Display numerals in purposeful contexts, for example, a sign showing how many children can play on a number track.
Use tactile numeral cards made from sandpaper, velvet or string.
Create opportunities for children to experiment with a number of objects, the written numeral and the written number. Develop this through matching activities with a range of numbers, numerals and a selection of objects.
Use a 100 square to show number patterns.
Make number games readily available and teach children how to use them.
Display interesting books about number.
Play games such as hide and seek that involve counting.
Use rhymes, songs and stories involving counting on and counting back.
Calculating
Encourage children to record what they have done, for example, by drawing or tallying.
Use number staircases to show a starting point and how you arrive at another point when something is added or taken away.
Provide a wide range of number resources and encourage children to be creative in thinking up problems and solutions in all areas of learning.
Encourage children to make links between cardinal numbers (quantity) and ordinal numbers (position).
Make number lines available for reference and encourage children to use them in their own play.
Help children to understand that five fingers on each hand make a total of ten fingers altogether, or that two rows of three eggs in the box make six eggs altogether.
Shape, Space and Measures
Provide a range of boxes and materials for models and constructions such as 'dens', indoors and outdoors.
Provide examples of the same shape in different sizes.
Have areas where children can explore the properties of objects and where they can weigh and measure, such as a cookery station or a building area.
Plan opportunities for children to describe and compare shapes, measures and distance.
Provide materials and resources for children to observe and describe patterns in the indoor and outdoor environment and in daily routines, orally, in pictures or using objects.
Provide a range of natural materials for children to arrange, compare and order.
Knowledge and Understanding of the World
Planning and resourcing
Exploration and Investigation
Give opportunities to record findings by, for example, drawing, writing, making a model or photographing.
Provide a range of materials and objects to play with that work in different ways for different purposes, for example, egg whisk, torch, other household implements, pulleys, construction kits and tape recorder.
Encourage children to speculate on the reasons why things happen or how things work.
Designing and Making
Make links with children's experiences to provide opportunities to design and make things, such as a ladder for Anansi the spider (in the West African traditional tale).
Provide opportunities for children to practise skills, initiate and plan simple projects, and find their own solutions in the design and making process.
Ensure that the organisation of workshop areas allows children real choices of techniques, materials and resources.
ICT
Provide a range of programmable toys, as well as equipment involving ICT, such as computers.
Time
Provide long-term growing projects, for example, sowing seeds or looking after chicken eggs.
Provide reference material for children to use, for example, comparing old and recent photographs.
Draw on the local community to support projects about the seasons. Tap into knowledge and expertise of local farmers, gardeners, allotment holders and so on.
Place
Provide stories that help children to make sense of different environments.
Provide stimuli and resources for children to create simple maps and plans, paintings, drawings and models of observations of known and imaginary landscapes.
Give opportunities to design practical, attractive environments, for example, taking care of the flowerbeds or organising equipment outdoors.
Communities
Provide opportunities for children to sample food from a variety of cultures, such as a traditional Caribbean dish.
Provide books that show a range of languages, dress and customs.
Use appropriate resources at circle time to enable children to learn positive attitudes and behaviour towards people who are different to themselves.
Ensure the use of modern photographs of parts of the world that are commonly stereotyped and misrepresented.
Physical Development
Planning and resourcing
Movement and Space
Plan target throwing, rolling, kicking and catching games.
Plan games where children can use skills in different ways, such as hopping backwards and galloping sideways.
Provide open-ended resources for large-scale building.
Use whole-body action rhymes such as 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes'.
Provide time and space to enjoy energetic play daily, either indoors or outdoors, visiting parks if other spaces are limited.
Ensure children know the rules for being safe in different spaces.
Regularly check resources for safety, for example, ensuring that fabric is clean and that planks are free from splinters and rough edges.
Provide a range of equipment at different levels, such as an overhead ladder, a tunnel, a bench and a mat.
Provide large portable equipment that children can move about safely and cooperatively to create their own structures.
Plan imaginative, active experiences, such as 'Going on a bear hunt'. Help them remember the actions of the story (We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury) and think about the different ways of moving and ways of avoiding bumping into each other.
Health and Bodily Awareness
Ensure that children who get out of breath will have time to recover.
Place water containers where children can find them easily and get a drink when they need one.
Plan opportunities, particularly after exercise, for children to talk about how their bodies feel.
Using Equipment and Materials
Provide a range of left-handed tools, especially left-handed scissors, for children who need them.
Provide a wide range of materials, such as clay, that encourage manipulation.
Offer different tools, techniques or materials when the available tools are inadequate to achieve the desired effects.
Provide tweezers, tongs and small scoops for use in play and investigation.
Provide a range of construction toys of different sizes, made of wood, rubber or plastic, that fix together in a variety of ways, for example by twisting, pushing, slotting or magnetism.
Creative Development
Planning and resourcing
Being Creative - Responding to Experiences, Expressing and Communicating Ideas
Introduce language that enables children to talk about their experiences in greater depth and detail.
Provide children with examples of how other people have responded to experiences, engage them in discussions of these examples and help them to make links and connections.
Provide and organise resources and materials so children can make their own choices in order to express their ideas.
Be sensitive to the needs of children who may not be able to express themselves easily in English, using interpreter support from known adults, or strategies such as picture cards to enable children to express preferences.
Exploring Media and Materials
Provide resources for mixing colours, joining things together and combining materials, demonstrating where appropriate.
Introduce pieces of wood, stone, rock or seaweed for children to feel and discover.
Provide children with opportunities to use their skills and explore concepts and ideas through their representations.
Have a 'holding bay' where 2D and 3D models and works can be retained for a period for children to enjoy, develop, or refer to.
Block play - In a nursery school, a small group of children work together on a large construction, and afterwards their work-in-progress is cordoned off, showing that their achievement is respected. [transcript]
You can watch the video via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.
Creating Music and Dance
Extend children's experience and expand their imagination through the provision of pictures, paintings, poems, music, dance and story.
Provide a stimulus for imaginative recreation and composition by introducing atmospheric features in the role-play area, such as the sounds of rain beating on a roof, or placing a spotlight to suggest a stage set. Provide curtains and place dressing-up materials and instruments close by.
Developing Imagination and Imaginative Play
Make materials accessible so that children are able to imagine and bring to fruition their projects and ideas while they are still fresh in their minds and important to them.
Provide opportunities indoors and outdoors and support the different interests of children, for example, in role-play of a builder's yard, encourage narratives to do with building and mending.
