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My Childminding Curriculum Part Two – Enhanced Provision

‘To heighten or intensify or improve something of already good quality.‘ (Oxford Dictionary definition of the word enhance.)

In my last blog about childminding curriculums I wrote about continuous curriculum – the kind of things that you continually provide day in day out for the children you care for. Although children can learn an awful lot through your everyday continuous provision and by following their interests, there are some things which do not naturally come up through day to day play. There are also those children who have a very strong interest in one particular activity who may not stray from it if not gently encouraged. Yes, it is important to value children’s interests but is is also part of our job to expand their learning by introducing ideas, concepts and vocabulary that they may not yet have encountered.

In order to offer your children the best learning opportunities it is important to provide opportunities over and above what you provide as part of your continuous curriculum. This is especially important for children from deprived backgrounds who may not have access to these sorts of opportunities outside your setting.

Extending an interest and adding challenge

Enhanced provision can be things you add to your continuous provision to make it more challenging for the children. For example, I like to add different resources to my sandpit such as toy treasure or ‘dinosaur bones’ for children to discover. I rotate different sorts of loose parts with my playdough and add different materials to complement my building blocks to encourage children to try something new.

Extend your children's interests by adding extra things to your continuous curriculum resources.
Expanding an interest by adding chickpeas to a farm small world set.

If these enhancements prove popular and the children continue to benefit from them you can add them to your continuous provision (I have troll figure from a Billy Goats Gruff kit which has made it’s way into permanent use,) but I find it beneficial to rotate the extra things I provide. It keeps things fresh and interesting for the children and helps prevent boredom.

Introducing something completely new

As well as extending on a existing interest I use my extended provision to introduce new ideas and concepts to the children. This is why I think exploring different themes or concepts with your children is important. It is also great fun and I find one of the perks of being a childminder is being able to explore things in this way with children.

Exploring themes, such as this frog theme, with children, helps them learn new ideas, concepts and vocabulary.

The theme or concepts I chose can vary according to the children I have and things like their ages and backgrounds. For very young children, exploring and helping them understand different concepts is really useful. For example, knowing the differences between hot and cold and the words to describe them correctly. These things might seem obvious to you but do your children really understand this concept? Or, do they still get muddled, doing things like describing cold things as ‘hot’ because they associate that word with describing temperatures? (Careful observations can help you uncover misconceptions such as these.)

For slightly older children exploring a theme can be useful. This may sometimes be as an extension of a concept they have previously tackled, for example, exploring the idea of melting and freezing after learning about the concept of hot and cold. Themes can help children learn new ideas and vocabulary, expand their cultural capital and maybe introduce them to a new passion! For example, I recently discovered my vehicle obsessed child also loves volcanoes, something I would never have found out if I didn’t do themes.

You do not need to provide themed or concept based activities every day, (or even every week if your children are very young.) Themes do not have to be all encompassing, creating lots of extra work doing things like redecorating or redoing all your displays every time your start a new theme.

Some themes and concepts can be combined to suit different aged children at the same time. For example a melting and freezing concept combined with a sea creatures theme.

When planning any additional themes or concepts think about the following:

  • What do you want children to learn or gain from your theme or concept? Try and be quite specific about what you want them to learn as this will make planning your activities easier. For example, when planning a road safety theme you might want children to learn to stop, look and listen when crossing the road as well as some of the safe places to cross. There may be different ways you help them learn this, such as outings, games or role play but your intent remains the same. (If you use the Toolkit themes this has all been done for you.)
  • Are there any areas of learning that you think children need more support with? For example, if all of your children appear to be struggling with a particular area of learning it may be because you need to plan more input for that area across your whole setting. Using themes and concepts is a good way to help you and the children focus on this area of learning in a fun way.
  • Are there any areas of learning that you need to cover with the children that you will not cover otherwise. For example, a theme about cleaning your teeth and visiting the dentist.
  • What are your children’s interests and how can you extend these using a theme OR challenge the children to try something completely new and different!
  • What are your own personal values and what is the ethos of your setting? You may want to have a very strong focus on outdoor learning, for example, meaning that the majority of your themes might be nature based or concerned with things like plants, animals or growing food. As long as you cover all the areas of learning I recommend being true to yourself and the sort of setting you want to run.

Make sure you use a range of themes across the year to provide a balance. Try to include the following:

  • STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) based themes.
  • Arts based themes.
  • Diversity and British Values based themes.
  • Literacy based themes.
  • Health and self care based themes.
  • Maths based themes.

Remember: Exploring themes or concepts are best used to enhance and extend the learning opportunities you offer children in addition to your day to day continuous provision, not replace it. Enhanced provision is there to enhance what you offer.

Please use the comments below to share your thoughts. How do you enhance what you offer on a day to day basis? Have you got any ideas for exciting themes or concepts to explore?

You may also like:

My Childminding Curriculum Part One – Continuous Provision.

‘Continuous provision is all the resources and activities that you continue to provide on a daily basis. In a small early years setting such as a childminders this may look slightly different depending on your children and the sorts of needs they have, but in general your continuous provision should cover opportunities for the children to work on skills and . . .’

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As a member of the Childminding Best Practice Club you will receive a monthly toolkit containing a wealth of resources designed to make your life easier. Each toolkit has two main sections; a ‘My Learning section with training and CPD and a, ‘My Curriculum section’ with planning, activities, tools, and resources based around a theme. The themes covered in your monthly toolkits have been specially chosen to provide you with a careful balance of themes and will help your children acquire skills and knowledge across a range of subjects and learning areas.

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Jennifer Activities for childminders, Childminding best practice, Planning for childminders

My Childminding Curriculum Part One – Continuous Provision.

I think a lot about the curriculum I am providing my childminding children. As an Ofsted registered childminder I am bound by the statutory learning requirements of the EYFS to offer learning experiences and opportunities under the seven areas of learning. However, I feel it is both my duty and privilege to to explore the world with each individual child I care for, seeing it through their eyes, providing experiences that excite them, truly help them grow and go further than the short descriptions in the EYFS bind us to.

This blog focuses mainly on continuous provision and is the first part of a two blog mini-series. In the next blog I will go into more detail about enhanced provision.

There are some things that all childminding curriculum’s should have in common. The main focus of any early years curriculum should be on skills and knowledge that all humans need. Skills such learning about how people interact socially, the rules that hold society together such as understanding, communicating and cooperating with other people. Children also need to have chance to grow and develop their physical skills, to gain an understanding of their own body, it’s abilities and how to keep it health, both in body and mind. (In the English EYFS these skills are defined under the three prime areas of, communication and language, personal, social and emotional development and physical development.) As well as mastering these essential building blocks of learning isn’t it wonderful to expose children to all the other amazing things our world has to offer? Maths, science, literature, the natural world, different peoples and ways of life, music and art, the list goes on and on.

I do not want anyone reading this blog to think that their curriculum should look exactly like mine, or anyone else’s for that matter. Everyone’s curriculum is going to be different, as an effective early years curriculum should be based around the needs of the individual children in your care. In my setting I use a mixture continuous provision along with supplementary topics or activities to provide children with opportunities to learn core concepts and embed skills and learning as well as explore new ideas and areas of interest.

What is continuous provision and why is it important?

Continuous provision is all the resources and activities that you continue to provide on a daily basis. In a small early years setting such as a childminders this may look slightly different depending on your children and the sorts of needs they have, but in general your continuous provision should cover opportunities for the children to work on skills and learning across all the areas of learning. This does not mean that you need loads of expensive and specialised resources. You can provide a good range of learning opportunities with a few basics. As well as access for children to move around freely, both inside and outside, my essential ‘continuous provision’ resources always include:

Books. Books are an absolute essential for helping children learn new vocabulary and concepts and enjoy shared reading experiences. A carefully chosen selection of books can help children embed their learning across all areas of your curriculum. I aways include always include books that children love listening to time after time until they know them by heart. Which books I provide depends on the children I have. At the moment I have a mixture of simple board books and classic picture books like, ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea.’ This ensures that all the children have books they enjoy without the need to have out all the books I own.

(For some suggestions about the sorts of books I recommend for very young children read: Eight essential books for childminders of very young children.)

With a small selection of resources, such as these bricks and toy animals arranged as a farm, childminders can cover all the areas of learning.

Simple wooden bricks in different shapes and sizes. These enable children to explore all sorts of mathematical concepts as well as being a useful resource in small world set ups! Building towers of bricks also helps children practice their fine motor control and hand to eye coordination as well as exploring concepts of cause and consequence. (What happens when I knock down this tower?)

Small world animals and people. Small world resources allow children to explore concepts using their imagination. They can be used for retelling stories that you have read to the children or to explore different scenarios that children encounter in real life. Having a selection of different animals and people also helps reinforce vocabulary, for example the names of different farm animals.

A small selection of ‘real world’ role play resources like cups, plates and spoons, along with some toy food. I find as a very rough rule of thumb, that children tend to explore real life scenarios on a real life scale before they start investigating small world toys. Having simple resources like this helps children practise social skills, such as pretending to make or share food, MORE

Musical instruments. These can be used in all sorts of listening and creative activities. (Just maybe keep them out of reach until the neighbours have woken up!)

Nursery rhymes basket. Sharing and learning nursery rhymes is a regular part of our day, helping children with their communication, language and literacy skills. My nursery rhymes basket is full of resources representing different nursery rhymes so that the children can pick their favourites. By choosing a selection of different rhymes you can also cover areas like maths (singing number rhymes) and understanding the world, (Old MacDonald had a Farm.)

Jigsaws. Chosen wisely these are very useful for covering lots of areas of learning. I find jigsaws a great characteristics of effective learning resource as well as helping children explore mathematical concepts such as shape, size and position.

Simple dressing up resources, like shoes, hats and bags with different fastenings. Great for practising fine motor skills and imaginative play as well as exploring what it feels like to be someone else.

Childminding children playing with toy vehicles in the sandpit.

Sand or some sort of ‘scoopable’ sensory material for filling, pouring, transporting, hiding things in and so on. This along with a selection of different containers for filling, posting things into, stacking, etc. These resources help children explore concepts such as how things work, object permanence, capacity, shape, weight and texture.

Mark making materials. I work from my sitting room so these are within sight so that children can easily request them by pointing but not so available that my walls will be ‘accidentally’ coloured in by my very youngest charges. However I have magnetic drawing boards that are available for children to independently access whenever they want.

Because my little cohort is currently very interested in vehicles I always have a selection of toy cars, tractors, etc. If I had a group of children with different interests the vehicles might come out less frequently unless requested by the children.

And finally the most important resource in your setting.

Yourself! Never forget that you are the most important resource your children have at their disposal. It is through your interactions with the children that they are supported to learn more than they would simply left to their own devices with the resources. You are the one that will introduce new vocabulary through having conversations to the children and reading to them. You are the one that will sing the nursery rhymes and teach the children how to count. You are the one that will model interactions and how to behave towards other people. You are the one that understands child development and what children should be striving to do next. You are the one that is there for children when they get overwhelmed and need support to regulate their big emotions. So, be exited. Be curious. Be supportive. Be brilliant!

IDEA: Why not have a ‘continuous provision’ day? Do not provide any additional resources or activities for one day but just concentrate on covering all the areas of learning with the things you always have out. Are there any ways that you can use your resources that you have not thought of before? At the end of the day have a think about whether there is anything you would like to change such as whether you need or want to add to your continuous provision resources.

You may also like this follow up blog on enhanced provision as part of your childminding curriculum:

Childminding curriculum – enhanced provision

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If you enjoyed this article you will also enjoy the monthly training modules that feature in the Childminding Best Practice Club toolkits. These cover a wide range of subjects designed to empower you in every aspect of your childminding journey – from nurturing child development to mastering the art of running your own business. Previous modules have included things like training on how to write a prospectus to advertise your setting, the impact of food and nutrition on children’s health and development, phonics for childminders, and simple childminding accounts. Each training module comes with supporting resources and a certificate to print when you have finished.

As well as training modules each toolkit also comes with a wealth of resources to help you build and enhance your curriculum through a series of different topics or themes.

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More information on different areas of learning:

EARLY YEARS AREAS OF LEARNING