Balancing Child Led And Adult Initiated Activities

[Guest]

Sorry, another question, I need to get this straight in my head!

 

I understand the idea that you follow each individual child's interests, it makes a lot of sense and gets away from the 'curriculum for babies' problem. But ... what if that child never shows an 'interest' in some areas (let's say counting or sand play) - can we still initiate and encourage that for him? Or do we completely follow what he wants to do?

 

And if we always follow the child's lead, then what about those children from homes where they don't get much stimulation, and where their 'interests' aren't wide because they have never been introduced to a variety of experiences.

 

Also, we are planning to create a new garden for the pre-school. Would it be okay for us to use this as a theme for some of the continuous planning? For instance, I was thinking the children could plant seeds or create collages to show what they want the garden to look like, but that would have to be adult initiated. It seems a shame to pass up the opportunity to link this into the provision.

[purplewednesday1]

We plan activites that are adult led but include in the planning lots of open ended questions. With your new garden that might be something like - taking your collage idea starting it off with random paper from magazines but having fabric, wools, real flowers / leaves for the children to see - they'll soon want to use them all. then if someone says about the real fower dying on the picture you can talk about drying flowers and pressing flowers (there's the activity for the next day) or what if they want to cut out flower pics to stick on - show them books and examples of decoupage (using flower pics to make the flower picture) - there's another day's activity (so now you have 3 activities going on - one planned by adults and two by children). You could make a real mosaic out of bits and bobs and cement it to a board to go in the new garden - planned activity, the children might then show an interest in the cement mixing (small world play with sand in the tuff spot)- they might suggest some real world play using real bricks to build walls it could go on and on!!

pw1

[Inge]

Sorry, another question, I need to get this straight in my head!

 

I understand the idea that you follow each individual child's interests, it makes a lot of sense and gets away from the 'curriculum for babies' problem. But ... what if that child never shows an 'interest' in some areas (let's say counting or sand play) - can we still initiate and encourage that for him? Or do we completely follow what he wants to do?

 

And if we always follow the child's lead, then what about those children from homes where they don't get much stimulation, and where their 'interests' aren't wide because they have never been introduced to a variety of experiences.

 

Also, we are planning to create a new garden for the pre-school. Would it be okay for us to use this as a theme for some of the continuous planning? For instance, I was thinking the children could plant seeds or create collages to show what they want the garden to look like, but that would have to be adult initiated. It seems a shame to pass up the opportunity to link this into the provision.

 

If a child doesn't show an interest in some are it really depends on what it is.... if counting we would find something he was interested in and incorporate that into a counting activity....say cars or dinosaurs... same with sand.. put something there to gain his interest...

 

the children can get stimulation from the interests of other children...and will follow through with them, or this is where a mini topic will come in for an areas you want to promote..like the garden/ outdoor area... we often used a story to read then asked about it, and this then stimulated them into their own ideas on it which you could follow through in the garden. In this way you could incorporate the children's ideas into what they would like outside. we did this, and children enjoyed seeing their ideas used.

 

Inge

[Guest]

Great, that's really helpful, all starting to make sense now!