Home / Learning and Development / Areas of Learning and Development /


  Development matters Look, listen and note Effective practice Planning and resourcing
Being Creative - Responding to Experiences, Expressing and Communicating Ideas
 
  • Express themselves through physical action and sound.
  • Explore by repeating patterns of play.
 
  • The ways that young children may repeat actions or make tuneful sounds as they climb steps, or step up and down from a stool.
 
  • Support children's patterns of play in different activities, for example, transporting blocks to the sand area.
 
  • Introduce young children to light fabric curtains, full-length mirrors and soft play cubes for hiding in, peeping at and crawling through.
Exploring Media and Materials
 
  • Create and experiment with blocks, colour and marks.
 
  • The processes which children engage in as they explore and experiment with media.
 
  • Accept wholeheartedly young children's creations and help them to see them as something unique and valuable.
 
  • Make notes detailing the processes involved in a child's creations, to share with parents.
Creating Music and Dance
 
  • Begin to move to music, listen to or join in rhymes or songs.
 
  • How children like to use shakers, blocks and body movement when they hear music, or to explore sound.



Making music - In a reception class, the practitioner and a group of children work out different rhythms using percussion instruments. [transcript]

You can watch the video, via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.

Video

 
  • Listen with children to a variety of sounds, talking about favourite sounds, songs and music.
  • Introduce children to language to describe sounds and rhythm, for example, loud and soft, fast and slow.
 
  • Make a sound line using a variety of objects strung safely, that will make different sounds, such as wood, pans and plastic bottles filled with different things.
Developing Imagination and Imaginative Play
 
  • Pretend that one object represents another, especially when objects have characteristics in common.
 
  • How children may turn to pretend play when an object comes to hand, for example, when a child uses a wooden block as a telephone.
 
  • Show genuine interest and be willing to play along with a young child who is beginning to pretend.
 
  • Provide a variety of familiar resources reflecting everyday life, such as magazines, fabric shopping bags, telephones or washing materials.