Planning, Obs, Ass Cycle..how To Reduce Paperwork

[eyfs1966]

At my setting, we seem to be making a mountain of paperwork out of planning adaptations for the individual child following observations. This is how the paper trail currently works:

 

1. Observation made and recorded. This is written up in child's learning journey (normally in more than one area of learning, as let's face it most obs cover several areas). If it gives rise to a planning adaptation and /or learning goal then get's raised at our staff meeting,and ...

 

2. Noted on child's individual learning plan.

 

3. Noted on weekly planning ammendment sheet (a summary of all obs leading to planning changes)

 

4. Noted on overall planning summary sheet (to show how our pre planned experiences are adapted/changed)

 

5. Follow up notes then made after planning change implemented

 

Is this what other settings do? Seems to take us hrs to record frankly sometimes really obvious issues, that we would make natural adjustments for without the need to record anything.

 

Can anyone help? Even our Ofsted inspector thought out system was cumbersome!! (Although she did give us outstanding, so at least must have made some sense to her).What systems do you use?

[Guest]

Hi,

 

Our system still needs tweaking but this is what we do....

 

-Record informal obs. on small white paper or longer obs. on formal sheet. put it in a plastic wallet on wall.

 

-Each keyworker has an expandable plastic folder with a section for each of their children. When anyone has a minute at the end of the day we sort the obs into each keyworkers file and into the individual named sections if time. Keyperson is then able to take that folder home easily

 

-We then stick obs. onto white A4 sheets with pritt stick just as they are. We don't type them up or copy them. We might photocopy an obs. if it relates to several children and black out the other children's names if need be. We find post-it's get stuck to everything else but still need glue to stay in the folder so prefer just to use small white paper.We stick the observations in all together in the same section and number them, also photos.

-At the front of the LJ we have a photocopy of the development matters descriptors for each subject and we refernce the obs. back to that.

 

For example: Obs. 3:5/10/09 'Betty was building a house from cardboard boxes with 2 other children. She said 'We need to put a number on the door of the house. My house has a 7. Let's do a 7. No, that's not right that's a 5. Shall I help you? Betty goes to get a number card with 7 on it." Look it's like this"

 

-We would then put number 3 next to statements on PSRN about recognising number, also in PSED about working with peers and maybe also in CD about role play and PD about building with large equipment. When we feel we could clearly demonstrate to another peron that the child meets a descriptor we highlight it.We use a different colour pen each half-term so we can see that they are continuing to make progress.

 

-Next steps is a bit trickier. Each keyperson has a sheet with all keychildren on where we write summative obs. at the end of a fortnight which sum up any key things observed that week. We use that to discuss the children at the planning meeting and write on the sheet what we are going to plan for the next fortnight to meet that child's needs. But I'm sure there must be a better way of doing this.

If we write next steps into the Learning journal it's not easy to access that at a planning meeting unless you sit with 8 folders on your lap!

I'm interested in how other people do it because there never seems to be enough time.