In The Moment Planning

Studies and reports have shown increased paperwork is detracting childcare practitioners from interacting closely with children. The impact that this has is that practitioners are spending less time engaging, nurturing, and supporting children’s learning and development.

Following the latest round of changes to the Ofsted Inspection Guidance (2019) and the Early Years Framework (2021), we have been gradually adopting elements of In the Moment planning into our day-to-day practice.

We want to explain to parents how we have reduced paperwork for our staff and provided them with more time to engage and inspire learning with the children in our care.

Introducing In The Moment Planning

Usually, parents are rarely involved in the planning or delivery of activities and learning that take place at their child’s nursery. But, imagine how enriched children’s experiences could be if their first educator were actively involved at a nursery level?

‘In the Moment’ planning is a relatively new concept in the Early Years sector; however, the theory and ideas behind it aren’t new at all.

Responsive parents and skilled practitioners use In the Moment planning every day without even realising it. Tuning into children’s learning by observing, listening, assessing, and planning how to respond has always been a fundamental part of our role as practitioners.

By incorporating In The Moment Planning into our curriculum, we can provide genuinely outstanding experiences to your children, as well as reduce heavy workloads for our staff.

Children are born curious. They have an insatiable interest in learning and absorbing the world around them.

Our aim by utilising In the Moment planning is to truly embrace children’s natural curiosity, follow their lead, and place them at the heart of everything we do.

So, What's Changed?

We used to pre-plan activities for children every week. These activities were based around the children’s interests. As these activities were carried out, children were observed, and the staff decided and recorded what ‘next steps’ to take to support the following week’s planning.

As you know, children’s interests and focuses change daily, which meant that waiting until the following day or week to create an activity based on a new interest was too late.

Additionally, practitioners had to complete several written observations of children every week. Written observations add heavily to workload, distract the practitioner from engaging with the child and aren’t always relevant to what is happening in practice.

With In the Moment planning the children are observed and supported with their next steps and new interests in that very moment.

There is no pre-documented planning as practitioners will be responding to children’s learning ‘in the moment’. Observations are still completed; however, they are completed different then put into your child’s Learning Book.

How Is It Achieved?

The nursery setting is organised so that each child can decide where to go, inside or outside, which resources to use, whether to be alone or with others and for how long they want to pursue an activity. By doing this they become deeply involved in their task and progress is happening constantly. However, their level of involvement may drop for a variety of reasons: they may not know what to do or how to do something, or how to use a piece of equipment, another child may be disrupting their play, or they may need something adding. When this happens, the child will seek help either from another child or an adult. This is when a practitioner will step in and assess what is needed for the child to carry on. This is what we would call a teachable moment. These moments will either be recorded as observations or WOW moments.

Observations

There are two types of observations which form part of our In the Moment approach:

Focus Week

Each week, we choose a group of children who will be part of a ‘focus group’ for the coming week.

Once the children have been selected, their parents will receive a form to fill out.

This form is designed to find out from parents what areas of interest, important celebrations, or milestone moments, that may be happening in their child’s life outside of nursery. Parents will need to make sure they bring the form back.

This request isn’t mandatory, though and your child will continue to the be part of the focus group for that coming week.

At the end of your child’s focus week we will stick all observations and pictures in your child’s learning journey. Ready for you to look at when you take them home for a couple of days. If it is not your child’s focus week please be assured that lot of leaning is still taking place as the environment will be carefully planned according to their needs and interests. We will still capture WOW moments as the occur. We would encourage parents to do the same and send us photos or notes about learning and what is happening away from nursery to help us build a complete picture of your child.

'Wow' Moments

‘WOW’ moments are an essential part of children's learning and development and should be recorded as a celebration of their achievement. WOW moments can be defined as moments when children do something independently for the first time, or where they have had a new experience. These moments will be photographed and captioned to put in a child’s learning journey.