Baby Room Observations And Next Step Planning

[Guest gemmafaith]

Hello,

 

The nursery I work in produces learning stories for all the children, consisting of observations then next steps and also wow moments sheets. However the baby room are struggling to use this system especially with the babies under a year, because the staff find it more difficult to form next steps out of any observations they make (due to the babies being so young it is not easy to identify next steps etc)

 

I wondered if anyone else encounters the same problems? And if so how have you overcome the difficulties?

 

Or if anyone has any ideas of what system we could for the baby room, it would be appreciated

 

If anyone has any examples they could upload of the systems they use would be very helpful

 

Thank you

[Guest]

Hi there! Noticed you hadnt had a reply from anyone yet so thought id try and help! Not sure how good i'll be though...

 

What kind of observations are your staff having difficulty forming next steps for? Maybe a few examples would give me a better idea of the kind of problems you mean.

 

I work in the baby unit myself so i can either give some kind of advice/help or insight into how we do ours....OR you'll bring up some issues that might make me question how we do things in our setting too! either way, ill do my best to answer any questions!

 

Ive only been with the babies for about 5 months and its definatly difficult trying to adapt things that work with the older children to suit the babies but that also doesnt change things too much so that you've got some sort of continuity throughout the place!!

[Guest gemmafaith]

Thanks for your reply,

 

Well the main difficulty they have is in choosing suitable next steps for the babies to do, the staff struggle to think of realistic steps they can do for babies especially under a year old.

 

I am just wondering, whether the baby room learning story format should be changed somehow, to make it more suitable for the baby room, I am just not sure how to do this.

 

(We are a very large baby room which can have up to 20 babies in at one time, so this does not help with doing observations and carrying out next steps)

 

I would appreciate any tips of how the staff if your baby room set out their learning stories?

[Guest]

(We are a very large baby room which can have up to 20 babies in at one time, so this does not help with doing observations and carrying out next steps)

 

Ah, see now thats where we differ. Our baby room only allows 10 babies and these age from 0-2 so we only ever have a 2 or 3 under ones in a day.

 

However, what we tend to struggle with is finding time to do things. So much of our day is taken up by the changing, sleeping, eating routines of the child that it leaves us very little time to do anything else! But we somehow struggle through Do you have the same problem?

 

We also find it difficult to do the whole 'planning from children's interests' thing as our babies dont tend to have much interest in any one particular thing and tend to flit between toys and actitivites quite a lot, so any next steps we do (and we dont actually do next steps as such anymore, we use P.L.O.D.S...) is very individual and is the key workers responsibility to ensure they carry out this p.l.o.d when they think the child is ready. Do you operate a key worker system or is it more of team effort?

 

Our learning journeys/stories are a lot more photo based that the older children in our nursery as we found this the easiest and quickest way to record and document observations and acheivments.

 

So basically (without trying to over-complicate things ) our system or process tends to work like this...

 

Each child has an observation sheet for the month. The key worker's job is to observe children during freeplay and make note of any observations for their key children. There is then space to write a P.L.O.D that may further the child's interest in a particular toy, learning area, activity etc. or may be the next step for their development. ie Harry is now standing unaided for short periods of time would simply have a P.L.O.D of encourage harry to take a few steps towards a familiar person using lots of praise and encouragement, or provide a selction on baby walkers in the room for harry to explore and use indepentandtly. It is then the key worker's job to make sure she does this. When harry acheives this, a photo will be placed in his learning journey with a simple statement of i can take steps, or i can walk etc. with a wee note about what happened and the date.

 

From our experience, parents only seem to be interested in the cute photo of harry walking for the first time or harry playing in the snow or the pretty little picture he painted with the blue and red paint. Not that he used the word snow to recall what he was playing in or that he was able to hold his paintbrush with more control than he has done before so we try to limit this 'writing' as much as possible and mainly celebrate the acheivments or 'wow moments' buy taking a photo and putting it in their folder.

 

This may be completly wrong but hey, it works for us and thats the main thing

 

Feel free to ask any other questions as im not sure ive answered everything