Guest Posted September 29, 2012 Posted September 29, 2012 Hi, I am FS Manager at a school based FS unit. I am quite happy with what we do for our weekly indoor planning but was wondering what people do for outdoor, and if anyone had any formats they wanted to share. Outdoor provision is something i have been working on for around 3 years and just sont seem to be there yet. How do people make outdoors manageable? Do mose people have the majority of things out and just add weekly/daily or do people change all resources over?
Mouseketeer Posted September 29, 2012 Posted September 29, 2012 We just say our cp plans cover both inside and outside, we do have a fair bit of usual outdoor stuff that's just there but staff risking assessing / setting up outdoors have to ensure that all areas are accounted for.
green hippo Posted September 29, 2012 Posted September 29, 2012 Hi dizzydaisys, I feel exactly the same as you! I'm in a school Nursery which shares it's outside area with Reception who use it differently than we do. We seem to be constantly trying to improve our area and never feeling we've got it quite right! I have to say that I find the CP planning the most difficult - as in how to actually record everything that we do in a concise manner, while showing that our obs do feed into our planning etc. I find that having a CP sheet with every area for each week ends up being a box filling exercise when often you don't want or need to add anything extra for every area, but continue with whats already out if you see what I mean. I became fed up of writing on every week what was new, what was continued and then feeling like I haven't done my job properly when I haven't added many new things (even though I know that it's not needed!) So this term we are trialling a new method. We are making a record on our medium-term plans the resources that we are initially putting out to support the medium-term learning intentions/focuses. If I add anything extra to any area of provision which directly supports a learning intention from the weekly plan, I write it in italics under the focused activity (I will then record if the enhancement will continue in the evaluation section). Then I have a separate indoor and outdoor CP plan (similar to the Outdoor plan on abc's blog) which I am going to use on a rolling basis to record any other enhancements which are linked to other learning needs. So they read: date, learning need & evidence of need, activity/ resources/target children, area of learning, evaluation with the idea that as I add/change resources etc I will record this on the sheet which will stay up for the half term. If the activity/resources etc don't need to be out anymore then it will be ticked off and dated. The hope is that what we do is documented but we don't have to keep repeating ourselves on every weeks planning. This probably sounds as clear as mud but I just needed a way of showing that areas had been enhanced for a reason but not necessarily every week - I especially find this true for the outdoors as the way they use resources can often developed over 2 or more weeks. We have also built up a number of 'basic' resources/area that are always there (with little changes here and there) and then other resources that change weekly/fortnightly etc. We struggle with storage and could really do with more wheel in and out type trolleys for our resources. We use mini-green houses for our large blocks and our paper, paints etc so they can stay out. Good luck If you come across any better ideas please let me know! Green Hippo x
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