Should We Have 2 Year Rolling Programme For Topics In A Fsu?

[Guest]

Hi, I teach Reception children mainly in a FSU and at the moment we repeat topics every year. However, as our nursery takes children from their 3rd birthday, I raised concerns to the manager that the very youngest children end up repeating the same topics 3 times (2 years in Nursery and then again in Reception). The manager says she is not concerned as the children are visiting the topic at different levels of maturity and development over this time. However, we are due for OFSTED sometime this academic year and I think they may say something too...what do you think? How do other FSU staff organise topics?

[Marion]

Im hoping to move from Topics but currently we opperate a 2 year rolling cycle this is as much to stop the staff being bored as the children. We are also very flexible and change to meet childrens interests so things get very fluid.

[Guest]

Thanks Marion, would you mind sharing what your topics on the 2 year rolling cycle are? thanks so much !

[Marion]

We use these as a rough guide but change if we find the children arent interested (this years group had no interest in fairystories which is normally very popular but went off looking at snails so we did minibeast instead)

Long_Term_Planning_Grid_year1.doc

Long_Term_Planning_Grid_year2.doc

[Guest tinkerbell]

Hi kermit

I teach r/yr1 and my collegue teaches yr1/yr2 and so we have a two year rolling programme.as marion says we do go with the childrens ideas more now and I also like to do seasonal things every year.

Tinkerbellx

[Guest]

Thanks for the info. When you go with the children's interests how do you show this in planning? Do you have to have detailed long term and short term plans when you do this or do you 'plan as you go'? The only problem we have in our setting is that the head prefers us to use specific topics only...we have some way to go yet in convincing him otherwise unless we can create some detailed schemes of work on common children's interests maybe?

[Guest]

Kermit21, this was a question I was going to ask too.

 

We are looking at motivational planning (have nicked this phrase from another thread).

 

And was wondering about LTP and MTP.

 

Can anyone share what they do or have any ideas?

 

Many thanks

 

p.s. obviously childrens interests do affect our planning, but we try to accomodate this alongside our theme and we want to get away from this.

[Guest]

I changed my planning because we had a two year rolling programme where there were 12 topics over 2 years. I decided that the children would benefit from having just 6 topics over the year but oviously we extend the objectives in F2 2 years running and I can see an improvement already

[Marion]

We did exactly the opposite. We previously did one topic each term and now do a minimum of 2 per term as we felt that the children were losing interest in the topic if it dragged on too long. We also add mini topics that are not shown on the LTP in response to the children's own interests these are added to the planning retrospectively.