Collect stories for, and make books about, children in the group, showing things they like to do.
Ensure resources reflect the diversity of children and adults within and beyond the setting.
Self-confidence and Self-esteem
Consider ways in which you provide for children with disabilities to make choices, and express preferences about their carers and activities.
Display photographs of carers, so that when young children arrive, their parents can show them who will be there to take care of them.
Making Relationships
Regularly evaluate the way you respond to different children.
Choose books and stories in which characters show empathy for others.
Provide books which represent children's diverse backgrounds and which avoid negative stereotypes. Make photographic books about the children in the setting and encourage parents to contribute to these.
Behaviour and Self-control
Duplicate materials and resources to reduce conflict, for example, two tricycles or two copies of the same book.
Self-care
Ensure that there is time for young children to complete a self-chosen task, such as trying to put on their own shoes.
Sense of Community
Display pictures of groups of young children, showing what they look like, and the things they like to do, eat, or play with. Provide positive images of all children including those with diverse physical characteristics, including disabilities.
Support children's understanding of difference and of empathy by using props such as Persona dolls to tell stories about diverse experiences, ensuring that negative stereotyping is avoided.
Communication, Language and Literacy
Planning and resourcing
Language for Communication
Allow time to follow young children's lead and have fun together while talking about actions such as going up, down or jumping.
Encourage parents whose children are learning English as an additional language to continue to encourage use of the first language at home.
Provide books with repetitive stories and phrases to read aloud to children to support specific vocabulary or language structures.
Language for Thinking
Plan play activities and provide resources which encourage young children to engage in symbolic play, for example, putting a 'baby' to bed and talking to it appropriately.
Linking Sounds and Letters
Collect resources that children can listen to and learn to distinguish between. These may include noises in the street, and games that involve guessing which object makes a particular sound.
Reading
Provide CDs and tapes of rhymes, stories, sounds and spoken words.
Writing
Give young children, who are keen to represent the same experience repeatedly, a range of mark-making materials.
Handwriting
Provide resources for finger-painting and play with soapy water, to interest young children who are not yet able to hold a brush or felt pen to make marks.
Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy
Planning and resourcing
Numbers as Labels and for Counting
Provide varied opportunities to explore 'lots' and 'few' in play.
Equip the role-play area with things that can be sorted in different ways.
Provide collections of objects that can be sorted and matched in various ways.
Provide resources that support children in making one-to-one correspondences, for example, giving each dolly a cup.
Calculating
Encourage children, when helping with domestic tasks, to put all the pieces of apple on one dish and all the pieces of celery on another for snacks.
Use pictures or shapes of objects to indicate where things are kept and encourage children to work out where things belong.
Shape, Space and Measures
Provide different sizes and shapes of containers in water play, so that children can experiment with quantities and measures.
Offer a range of puzzles with large pieces and knobs or handles to support success in fitting shapes into spaces.
Knowledge and Understanding of the World
Planning and resourcing
Exploration and Investigation
Provide materials that support particular schemas, for example, things to throw, for a child who is exploring trajectory.
Find out from parents about their children's interests and discuss how they can be encouraged.
Plan for inclusion of information from parents who do not speak English.
Designing and Making
Provide a range of items to inspire young children's curiosity, ensuring that their investigations are conducted safely.
Provide culturally diverse artefacts and encourage parents to bring in culturally specific and familiar items from home to share.
ICT
Incorporate technology resources that children recognise into their play, such as a camera.
Time
Collect stories that focus on the sequence of routines, for example, getting dressed, asking "How do I put it on?".
Place
Develop use of the outdoors so that young children can investigate features, for example, a mound, a path or a wall.
Communities
Give opportunities for talk with other children, visitors and adults.
Physical Development
Planning and resourcing
Movement and Space
Provide young children who have physical disabilities with equipment that is easily accessed and resources that meet their individual needs.
Tell stories that encourage children to think about the way they move.
Provide different arrangements of toys and soft play materials to encourage crawling, tumbling, rolling and climbing.
Health and Bodily Awareness
Offer choices for children in terms of potties, trainer seats or steps.
Establish routines that enable children to look after themselves, for example, putting their clothes and aprons on hooks or washing themselves.
Create time to discuss options so that young children have choices between healthy options, such as whether they will drink water, juice or milk.
Using Equipment and Materials
Provide materials that enable children to help with chores such as sweeping, pouring, digging or feeding pets.
Provide sticks, rollers and moulds for young children to use in dough, clay or sand.
Creative Development
Planning and resourcing
Being Creative - Responding to Experiences, Expressing and Communicating Ideas
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
Make notes detailing the processes involved in a child's creations, to share with parents.
Creating Music and Dance
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
Provide a variety of familiar resources reflecting everyday life, such as magazines, fabric shopping bags, telephones or washing materials.
