Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Collections

There is an important balance to be struck between child-initiated and adult-chosen activities in a setting's choice of equipment, says Julian Grenier, in a feature introducing a new series.

One of the trickiest dilemmas in the early years is how to balance adult-chosen planning and resourcing with opportunities for children to follow their individual interests. This balance is something that can easily get knocked off centre, in my experience of working with nurseries and playgroups. Some practitioners try to ensure that all their planning is led by the interests of individual children, usually by having a 'target child of the week' type of system.

This means that planning tends to shift focus radically from one week to the next, in keeping with the rota of focus children. Yet for those children, one week is rarely enough for them to widen their experiences and develop their skills much. It is also very difficult to build up a good range of resources to deepen children's interests, with such a short timescale. As a result, the materials to support the children may be insufficient to generate real enthusiasm.

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