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Hello and welcome to Little Learners. Today's video is a much requested video that I did actually film
quite a while ago and then I lost lots of footage and it was quite emotional so let's
just pretend that never happened and start again! I've had lots of questions from those of you who
are new to Reception, NQTs or even those of you who have been working in Reception and just want to
evaluate your own practice, about how I plan my week and how I set out my provision. If you end
up finding this video helpful don't forget to give it a like and subscribe for more videos just like
this. So I did make a video not too long ago about the basics of planning: long-term, medium-term and
short-term planning. So if you haven't seen that and you want to get a bit of a reminder or if you
don't know about those yet, you want to learn about them, I will link it in the description
box below and in a card. Today I'm just going to be focusing on short-term planning really for
Reception and how I do it but obviously there are lots of different ways of doing your planning and
lots of different ways that different early years settings do their planning, different schools do
their planning, so do take it all with a pinch of salt, and maybe if I say something about my
own practice that you like you can pick and choose the bits that you want to do and implement them in
your own practice. So let's talk about planning for the week. Normally what we would do is look at the
medium-term plan and take a look at what learning objectives we have for that medium term, so maybe
that might be a half term or a term and usually we will have decided beforehand how we're going to
break up that medium-term plan into, kind of, chunks - if you're in a setting where you do topic-based
learning then maybe you will have broken it up into topic-based chunks, you might have done it
slightly differently but usually you have an idea of kind of what order you want to do all of these
objectives from your medium term plan in. So once I know what objectives I want to have in my weekly
plan I will also then look at the week before and see if there's anything that I want to carry
over. Maybe something that the children didn't quite understand or something that the children
really enjoyed and I think they will really engage with again this week and that might help
their learning this week. Then I'll make sure to put that in and I'll divide everything up into the
areas of learning. So I'll have a heading for all of the areas and then put kind of the objectives
that I want to do under each of them and maybe even just some notes about some particular
activities that I want to do as well. Now it really does depend on your setting, how much detail you
need to go into in this plan - some settings I know have to submit their plans to SLT, some don't, some
don't like to really do very detailed plans for the week, if you're in a one form entry school your
planning might look very different to teachers in a three-form entry school and the other thing
that comes into it is if you have books or not. so some settings still use learning journals
or exercise books - whatever you want to call them - where children actually write in the exercise book.
this is usually more common in receptions attached to a school rather than a standalone reception or
reception attached to an early years setting. So if you do have a requirement of how often
children need to write in their books (which is a completely different video) then you might need to
put that into your planning but usually I would just write the objectives and any activities that
I really really want to do. I will make sure that there is a good chunk of learning for every area
so that every single week we have objectives in every area of learning. Obviously these aren't
stand-alone lessons, so I might have an objective in communication and language which I can achieve by
doing some work in understanding the world. So you know how that all goes where everything
kind of interlinks. I'll also make sure that I've written down which letter sounds we're
going to be focusing on that week, so whether we are introducing those sounds or if we are
at the point where we are revising those sounds, if we're introducing a sound then we just do one
sound per day. Another great thing to do if you do have last year's plans is just to have a look
and often you can just tweak those because if they worked last year then often they will work
this year, you might just need to tweak them a little bit for the children that you have.
So then once I've got my weekly plan I then move on to my timetable for the week. So timetabling
is actually a big part of my planning because in timetabling I'm not just saying, "okay here we're
going to learn this sound, and here we're going to do this and here we're going to have a music
lesson", I'm actually writing down the activities that I want to do and some of the provision that
I want to make sure I have out. I always think that it's good on a timetable for Reception to have
Friday completely clear, and this is just something I really like to do because you never know how the
week is going to go. You never know if children are going to struggle with something and it's going to
take longer than you thought it would, you never know if children might really be so engaged in
something that it ends up taking longer than you thought it would or you want to revisit it at the
end of the week, so I always think it's good to not fill your timetable with too much so that
you feel stressed because you haven't got through everything by the end of the week. In one school
I worked in we did reading every afternoon with the children, so we had provision set up but the
teacher would be doing reading with the children one-to-one and so that we could write in their
reading journals, and we had to read with every child every week so that meant that the morning
portion of the day was really the time when any directed tasks or activities, or teacher-led or
teacher-encouraged activities would be taking place. I also like to mark out on my timetable
any activities or areas of provision that I think will be really good for observations.
So obviously you're doing observations all the time and the new guidance for September
does say that we don't need lots and lots of evidence to back up our observations and our
levels for children, but if you want to be conscious about what observations you're doing, it
can be really helpful just to put a little star next to an activity because you think, "oh I feel
like the children are going to show me some really good language in this activity", or "oh actually it
would be really good to watch the children when they're doing this addition activity because I
don't feel like I know exactly where some of them are at at the moment", so that can be quite helpful.
When it comes to provision I usually have an idea of what I'm going to do during the week and then
whatever the children are interested in I'll try and put that into the classroom as well.
Some days I will come in and decide that morning that a certain table is going to
have certain activity on it, so you know I think you have to be really flexible in Reception and
in early years in general so let's look at this, sort of, provision map that I've made
here to give you an idea of what the classroom setup might look like first thing in the morning.
So here we have our main areas, we have our carpet area at the front, we have a table at either side
of that, we might have another table depending on how big your classroom is then we have a
table which is kind of our art area. We have a reading corner and we have a role play corner.
Now again this is obviously dependent on how large your classroom is and what your classroom setup is
like so this is just an example. We then have the outdoor area as well where we can have something
set up. Now it's really important to remember that not all early years settings have the ability to have
the outdoor area accessible all the time. They should be able to use the entire outdoor area and
for children to be able to just go wherever they want to, but staffing is an issue. So if you don't
have enough staff to be able to safely manage indoors and all of your outdoors area then you
have to kind of improvise. So you might have just a bit of an area outside your classroom if your
classroom backs onto the playground for example where you're going to set up some provision and
the children know that they're not to go past that point. So if you're having a little bit
of an outdoor area you might have your water tray, your sand tray, you might have an area for building.
Just make sure that you do have some outdoor learning and then obviously during the week,
and you can put this into your timetable, you will have time when the children can be supervised and
can use more of that outdoor area. So let's take a look at this example then. Once the children have
done their morning registration and maybe some phonics learning and they go off to their
provision this is what the classroom might look like. So on the carpet we might have some building
activities going on, so maybe some Duplo or some Mobilo, that's for children to make whatever they
want to make. Then we might have a phonics activity, so maybe we'll have some sound buttons that
I've recorded my voice saying certain sounds into and then the children have to listen to those and
find the objects that start with that sound. So if they hear a 'p' then they go and look for a pig for
example. Getting our technology in there as well. Then we might have a pattern making activity where
children are threading beads onto some string and maybe we've got some examples of different
patterns they can make, and then they can make their own patterns as well. In the reading corner
children are just able to freely look at any books that are in there, I might also have some cuddly
toys as well so that children can snuggle up with a teddy bear and also read to their teddy bears.
So sometimes children find it a little bit nerve-wracking to read out loud but reading
to a teddy bear, they seem to be okay with that sometimes. So we'll have some of those in there
as well. On our art table maybe we have brought in some nature, so if it's Autumn maybe we've brought
in some dried leaves and some twigs and a little bit of soil, and maybe we'll throw in some autumnal
colours like some red, orange and yellow paint and children can just make whatever they want
with those resources. Then we'll have the role play corner which usually will be set up in a different
theme each half term. If you're working in a topic -based school then it will probably align with the
topic that you're doing. Then we've got our other table that might have some small-world play on
there, like a farm or a pirate ship. I also like to put a basket of books that are related to
that small world play on the table as well and I also like to put some key words on there, maybe
some CVC words or depending on where we are in the year some trickier words that relate to
that small world play, so we've got some reading in there as well, and often I like to put some numbers
in there as well. So for example if children are playing with a pirate ship small world play and
I've got some little shells in there I might take a picture of four shells laminate that
and do a few of those so that they can start matching and counting the shells.
So it just gives you an idea of how you can bring lots of different areas of learning into the small
world play. Then if we go outside in our water tray, maybe we will be washing clothes and hanging them
on a washing line today. In our sand tray maybe we've hidden some dinosaur bones and children have
little shovels and little brushes so that they can excavate the area and discover the dinosaur bones.
And then maybe we have a mat on the floor with a doll's house or some more building materials,
and if you're able to in your outdoor area maybe you might have some gross motor skill activities
going on out there, so for example some hoops and children are throwing bean bags into them,
or maybe just children can run around as much as they want to and invent their own games, because
of course that's really important too. So that just gives you an idea of the different types
of provision that you can have out all at once, and for me, having different areas where I know
I'm going to have different areas of learning - and of course lots of them mix - is just really helpful.
Of course, deploying support staff is also really important when I started in reception as an NQT,
I did have a teaching assistant but only in the mornings, so in the afternoons I was just by myself
and that could be really, really difficult when you've got this provision and children
everywhere, and you've got to keep an eye on all of them and read with them all at the same time.
So depending on if and when you do have support staff, make sure you're using them. Take a look
at your weekly planning and your timetable and decide where would be best to have these
support staff working. Also remember to ask your teaching assistants or your other support staff
what they really like to do. I've had a TA before who absolutely loved everything to do with art, so
she did lots of the art activities and it meant that a lot of our art provision got to be even
better than it would have been if I had done a lot of it! And I've had a TA who really enjoyed working
with children on their numbers and she would do lots of interventions with them. She loved
doing that and that worked really well. There's no point in having someone who is really talented in
a certain area and not utilising that talent, so make sure you talk to your support staff about
what they really like to do and what they feel they are most talented in and see if you can use
that in your classroom. Okay, so that was a lot of information! I hope it's given you an idea of how
I might plan my week and my days and how things go. As I said you really do need to be flexible
in Reception because the days do not go the way you think they're going to go most of the time!
You can have a nice structure to your day and I have made a video before about the daily routine
in a Reception class and kind of the structure of the day,, so if you want to know more about
that I'll link that video below as well. Let me know in the comments if this video was helpful!
Is this the way you do things? Is there anything that you liked or that you didn't like? Anything
you might be taking into your practice? Is there anything that you do that you think other teachers
might really benefit from knowing? Please let me know in the comments below. I really love it when
you all share tips with each other in the comments it's just an example of how great the Little
Learners community is! Don't forget I now have a website, LittleLearners.education where you can
learn lots about early years, you can buy resources and you can book consultations with me, so be sure
to check that out and don't forget to subscribe to the Little Learners newsletter. I will leave all
the links in the description box below. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.
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