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alex__17
20-03-2014, 07:52 PM
I have siblings 2 days, so one day a 14 month old and 3 year old, 2 and 4 year old another day, plus my son of 20 months.

How many activities do you plan for a normal day? And is it normal for attention span to be just a couple of minutes, sometimes younger ones have no interest at all and just want to explore the garden?

I put coloured water in a baby bath thw other day and had a basket of objects and we were going to see which sunk or floated, 3 year old kind of got it but more chucked stuff in and spent a bit of time filling different size containers so I counted eg how many cups to fill big bucket with her, younger ones just splashed about fishing out objects, everyone enjoyed it but it cant have lasted more than 5 minutes before they were wandering off or tipping the water over the patio...is this normal?
Any tips or just keep planning activities on their interests which at the mo seem to be sand and water outside!

Glitter
20-03-2014, 08:50 PM
I don't know if everyone else will agree, but this is what happens at my house.

Very often I plan an activity, but the children either don't want to do it, or think up a better way of doing it! I just write a quick evaluation in my planning about how the activity went and how the children improved it for me (Ofsted really liked this as it showed how my planning was flexible and worked around the child's interests).

I find most activities only last five to ten minutes and most of the time the children are happy doing their own thing. As long as they are happy, I let them do what they want, I find they are still learning all the time but in a relaxed way.

P.s. Your activity with the water sounds like fun, and yes my mindees would be tipping the water out after 5 minutes!:)

alex__17
20-03-2014, 08:55 PM
I have to say that's a relief...go to all the effort to think of these activities for them to take one look and wander off and do something else haha!

I've been noting things all down in a book, what we did, planning for next time, but I might do a seperate planning section in their learning journeys maybe so it's all in the same place then I can comment on how it went etc. still struggling to find a planning/paperwork format that works for me without having hundreds of files and never adding to any