Planning In Fsu

[Guest]

How does planning in a FSU work?

As a school we have just started to redesign our curriculum to make it more interesting and relevant to our children. At the moment we have our nursery in a seperate building to the rest of the school however there is planning underway to attach the nursery to the school and create a FSU within the next 2 years. At the moment our Nursery and Reception plan seperately and we have begun to draw up a list of differnt topics for Nursery and Reception for our new curriuclum. Surely in a FSU you all participate in the same topic at the same time, otherwise aren't you defeating the object of being a unit?

Sorry if this seems really simple I just don't want to spend all year devising new MTPs and our Nursery to do the same if we are going to have to redo them in two years time. Do you think we should plan the MTPs together?

Any examples of how you medium/short term plan in a unit would be greately appreciated. Am the FS coordinator and feel like i should know this already.

[Guest]

In our unit our long term plan shows topics for the three terms, however in our medium/ short term plans we show the differences between FS1 and FS2.

At the moment our topic is the Post Office/ Jolly Postman. So in the Reception class/ language base we have a post office and lots of the activities are based around the Post Office role play (letter writing/ weighing etc). In Nursery/ maths base we focus on a traditional stories from the Jolly Postman (builds on from home corner nicely and introduces traditional stories). So far we have had Goldilocks and Little red Riding Hood as well as small world play of Three little pIgs/ Gingerbread man. What we expect of the children is differentiaited according to their needs/ assessments and targets. all chn have the oportunity to access all areas with activities differentiaited accordingly.

 

Chn will use the resources as they understand them!!

We created a dentist role play area(3 weeks) in reception (part of our senses topic). Reception looked at non fiction books, talked about their limited experiences/ mind mapped and drew up a list of what they needed. The items including a dentists mirror for oral inspection! were carefully made. to discourage chn from putting the props into their mouths most of the resources were made on a large scale. So lots of lovely silver paper mirrors for looking into your mouth were made.

Nursery had only been in for a week or two and one little boy had ventured very quickly out of the comfort zone of nursery into the dentist in reception. After holding the mirrors and looking at them for a moment and seeing the till that we had provided he rushed of to nursery. he came back shortly with a group of children and invited them to buy all the lovely lollies that he had found, quickly slipping into the role of the shopkeeper.

 

Nothing wrong with his interpretation- they did look like lovely shiny lollies!!!

But beacuse of the involvement of the reception children in the creation of the props and what they wanted to use most reception children continued to use the props for dentist role play- few ventured into the sweet shop play (and I was very disappointed too because I know which I found more fun)

 

Lisa

[Marion]

Hi we used to call ourselves and early years unit and although we followed the same topics the nursery and reception staff planned seperately. One of the advantages of becoming a FSU was that we now plan together as a team and can bounce ideas of each other. At the moment we are using the Norfolk/Southwark model for our Med Term Planning but it looks like Ive been successful in persuading the team to abandon TOPICS (yeah!) So we will be using a modified version of this for our long term planning abandoning medium term planning altogether and working from the children's interests for our short term planning which we already do retrospectively for part of the week.