How can adults enhance the early years continuous provision?
As we have explored in previous articles the benefits to creating a more effective continuous provision environment in the early years are vast. Now you have taken a continuous provision approach to your early years environment you may be wondering what the adults role is and how to plan to extend the children’s learning when all the resources are readily available. This is where enhanced provision begins. As with anything adult led or any extended learning this process involves the planning cycle. The early years foundation stage shows a simple version of the planning cycle so all practitioners should be aware of how to complete this. To make your planning cycle work alongside continuous provision you may choose to add one simple element. The planning cycle may look more like OBSERVE, PLAN, ENHANCE and REVIEW. The element of ‘enhance’ has been added here. Lets explore each part of the planning cycle in more detail.
OBSERVING in the early years
This is the starting point for every early years practitioner and allows you to discover children’s interest’s, strengths and weaknesses. This is vital information about each child so that the environment can be effectively planned to meet all children’s individual needs and abilities. You may choose to observe in a variety of ways and many settings have their own set sheets/cards and systems for documenting observations. All observations are based on the same principles, Look, Listen and Note. This may then be logged in the form of a snapshot, narrative, time sample or various other observation methods. It is important that these observations are collated and inform the next stage of planning.
PLANNING continuous provision in the early years
Here you can now use your observations to see if there are any resources not out as part of your continuous provision that could be added or changed to promote the development of the children. Your observations may have highlighted that you are lacking resources which promote understanding of the world, you can then plan to add more provision into the environment. Your observations may have highlighted that the children are no longer interested in the provision you have in your role play area, you can then plan to change this by adding or taking away resources to bring interest back to this area.
Enhancing the continuous provision
This again stems from any observations you have seen, you can now use these observations to enhance the resources you have out to meet interests and next steps. For example you may have discovered through your observations that the children are interested in the recent changes to the season with it now becoming autumn. From this you may then choose to enhance the provision in your art/ malleable and tactile area to include conkers, leaves and sticks that the children can then create their own pieces of art work with through sticking and conker rolling. You may have discovered that a few children can now count to 10 and because of this you may want to work on the next step of recognising numerals. You may then choose to enhance the provision in your maths area and add some number flash cards to the unifix tray so the children can match the amount of unifix to the number card.
REVIEWING your enhance early years provision
You may have a section for evaluation on your planning sheet or you may choose to review your planning and put your changes onto the following weeks planning. Reviewing or evaluation is an important process in the planning cycle and should not be missed out. This not only improves the children’s learning and development but also helps practitioner reflect on their practice. You should review not only the enhanced provision that was on offer for the children but also the continuous provision. Consider what went well and what you would do differently if you were to complete the activities again.
For more on planning continuous provision in your early years setting go here