Leadership - helping the team move to spontaneous planning

In the reception unit we are entering a period of change! We strive to provide the best opportunities for our children, but have begun to question the way that we plan, and what we actually teach the children. Are we catering for their learning needs, or are we enforcing our own ideas and teaching them things that we think they will like?

We began to think about this process back in the autumn term, when we took an opportunity to ask the children what they would like to learn about. This culminated in lots of enthusiastic voices with a keen interest in space and all things alien. From this we planned a topic about space and took the children on a fantastic trip to the National Space Centre, where they could gaze in awe and wonder at the rockets and planets, and meet Astronaut George. This was a successful topic, but it did result in hours of teacher-prepared plans directing the children in what we thought they might enjoy. We wanted to delve even deeper into the minds of our children and look closely at what they enjoyed doing each day, and how we could move them forward in their thinking.