In The Moment Planning

The child should feel valued, important, interesting, capable, and able to learn as well as gaining knowledge, skills, attitude and understanding therefore making progress in one or several areas of the Early Years Curriculum.

They should gain a sound understanding of the child’s knowledge, skills, attitude, understanding and progress.

This way of working means that all written planning is retrospective  (there is no forward planning). Each practitioner records what they have done to help the children progress each day on the iPad application Tapestry which the parents have access to.

1.6. Practitioners must consider the individual needs, interests, and stage of development of each child in their care, and must use this information to plan a challenging and enjoyable experience for each child in all of the areas of learning and development.     Planning in the moment fully allows this to happen and encourages the children to pursue their own interests.

This way of planning means that the learning environment (both the indoor and outdoor environment) constantly need to be reviewed and adapted to ensure that the children have a constant deep level of involvement in their activity. The resources in each area also need to be plentiful and engaging. There is access to planning and design sheets for the children to be able to discuss and design their work supporting opportunities for adult and child collaboration.

All observations made of the children must be based on quality interactions between children or children and practitioners. They must include any teaching that has taken place or progress that a child or group of children have made. All practitioners are responsible for highlighting progress in observations. Emphasis is highly placed on using ‘I wonder…’ statements i.e. ‘I wonder if…’, ‘I wonder what…’, ‘I wonder how…’. We feel that this approach to questioning is a lot less pressurising and allows the children to open up more readily.

Instead of having focus activities, each week there will be focus children. On the last session before children are focus children parents will be given a questionnaire to take home to be returned on their first session as a focus child. The parents will be expected to fill in the questionnaire with any comments and the following week will be invited in to meet with their child’s key person to talk about progress and their completed questionnaire. We encourage parents to take photos of their child and add them to Tapestry for good links with home/school learning. Once a week all observations using the Ipad are uploaded for parents to see. Any next steps which have been identified during the child’s focus week but which have not yet been fully addressed will be worked on with the child during continuous provision in the future and reviewed when it is that child’s turn again as a focus child.