The placement is set in a primary school with a two story junior school and an infant’s school. Both of which have IT rooms, hall space for energetic activities, music rooms and access to equipment such as hula hoops bean bags and large play equipment. (Jungle gym, slide, tunnels etc.) The placement is a Pre-school situated on the site of the infant’s school. It has access to equipment and resources used by the school as well as equipment funded by the pre-school.
The School is set in a small village which has a public house, a park, a small community hall, local shops (includes post office, dentists, grocers, butchers, hardware, convenience and take away food stores.) and residence. The placement is a community pre-school so there are many different races, ages, abilities and social status. The children are aged between 2years 9months and 5years. There are only three 5 years olds as many continue into reception at the infants school. There are 15-20 children in each session at the placement. With a total of 1-5 sessions each there are 45 children currently enrolled by the pre-school. Each child is assigned to a key worker. There is a ratio of 1:5 staff to children. There are in total 7 practitioners and 2 volunteers, it is managed by a committee of parents.
Aim To provide age/ability appropriate activities/experiences that will encourage the development of knowledge and understanding of the world. Rationale The curriculum plan will have fourteen activities and experiences that will be based around the theme of fruit, vegetables and the Harvest. They will be implemented over the space of 5 weeks starting in the second half of the winter term 2001.
This early years curriculum plan has been planned to further the children’s knowledge in fruit, vegetables and the Harvest using creative activities to further develop their creative and cognitive skills. The experiences and activities will help the children to develop their descriptive thought. This kind of cognitive structure is present in Jean Piaget’s pre-operational stage. They need to develop an internal representation of the world that allows them to describe people, events, and feelings. Children who have not passed this stage do not know that the amount, volume or length of an object does not change length when the shape of the configuration is changed. These children are then unable to move onto the concrete operational stage of Piaget’s theory.
Most of the activities are adult led and will take roughly 10 minutes per child. There is 45 minutes during free-play so I can get all the children processed in 2 days. (4 free play sessions.) These are intended to promote children’s learning and development though: – Language activities (speaking and listening) – Mathematical activities (counting and sorting) – Knowledge and understanding of the world (scientific aspects: how plants grow.) – Personal, social and emotional (sharing, taking turns, discussing harvest.) – Creative activities (using paints etc (fine motor) dance, drama and music (gross motor.))
These areas of learning are important, as all children need the basics of the foundations to learning. This is where the foundation stage helps all settings with children under the age of 5. It helps them to develop the children correctly so they have no trouble with learning difficulties when they start in key stage one. Tassioni and Beith identify this. (1999) They say that a child needs the basic understanding and learning of simple concepts and routines is important because “…You need a foundation onto which you can build the child’s learning.”
I agree with this, as it is true for everything you build. Like a house. Without the walls the roof will fall, with out the foundations to learning the child will have difficulties. All of the activities can be implemented by all of the children with in the Pre School. All of the activities can be implemented by all of the children in the pre-school taking into account the constraints of the setting and safety and the needs of the children / parents / carers and staff. To carry out these activities I would provide suitable resources for the effective implementation of the activities and make use of the resources already available within the setting. The activities will enable the children to gain relevant meaningful experiences as well as increasing their skills.
Good planning in all childcare settings is needed to provide a broad and balanced and differentiated curriculum. This would not only support the children’s needs and learning in an effective manor and would also ensure that all the activities, experiences and equipment are suitable and appropriate to the children’s level of development and their ability. By establishing a daily or weekly routine offers different and many opportunities for E.W.Y’s (Early years workers) to observe, analyse and same improvements when necessary. Good planning also counts as a form of record keeping and can be used to show parents and carers how their child is developing throughout. These records would imitate to parents/cares their child’s physical, intellectual, language emotional, social, moral and spiritual needs and further development through the curriculum.