Enhancing your EYFS mark making area

Could your mark making area do with a revamp?

Do you look at your mark making area and think it needs looking at? Are children spending less time in this area? Making simple but effective changes may make all the difference.

Continuously evaluating and enhancing your EYFS mark making area can lead to children building on and learning new skills. Adding resources that will draw children into this area is a great technique, look at what children are into and try and incorporate this, for example, if children are fascinated by dinosaurs, why not purchase some dinosaur pencils or dinosaur note books. Be adventurous and use your knowledge to create an inviting mark making area.

Deciding what to put in your mark making area;

Deciding what you put in this area can be taken from observations or children’s interests. Most mark making areas will consist of pencils, pens crayons, paper, notebooks etc. Why not add other resources such as envelopes, postcards, luggage labels, post-it notes. All of these resources are a great addition to a mark making area. You may find that children will use the resources in their play eg posting letters and acting out being a postman, writing holiday postcards etc. Why not create a post-box and add this to your role play area.

Here is a list of resources to add to your mark making area

• Rulers
• Chalks and chalkboard
• Calculators
• Thick crayons
• Wipe board pens and wipe board
• Whole puncher
• Envelopes
• Various sized notebooks
• Highlighters
• Finger crayons

Making your area accessible;

Making this area accessible is important for children especially when encouraging children to independently select resources. Ensuring the resources are at children’s height will allow children to freely access the resources of their choice and develop their self-confidence. For the younger children, there is no reason why children shouldn’t have access to these resources, offering children the opportunities to make choices is a fundamental part of the EYFS. Therefore, it is important that childcare practitioners create mark making areas that are suitable for the ages and stages of the children in their care.

Use your observations, other colleague’s views and your judgement to determine when and how to enhance your mark making area. Monitoring and evaluating this area of continuous provision will give children further scope in their learning and development leading to them reaching their full potential.

For more ideas on how to enhance other areas of your room click here

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