Enabling Environments: Play and the revised EYFS
Friday, July 20, 2012
Community Playthings' new resource 'Play and the Revised EYFS' has advice on how to create enabling environments
A truly enabling environment provides the stimulation and the positive relationships that support children to feel safe enough to explore. But this has to be the kind of environment that allows children to take as much time as they need:
- To be absorbed by what they choose to do and to come back to it time after time
- To be stimulated by the feel and smell of materials, the sounds they make and the mess that can be made with them
- To make connections with what's happened before
- To follow a game through to a personal conclusion of their own choosing
- To sit and watch others until they feel ready to have a go themselves
- To take risks and make mistakes and get up and have another go
- To move freely indoors and out and to have the space to roll and jump and spin and dance whenever the mood takes them
- To experiment with the language of numbers and begin to make sense of what they can do with them
- To see comparisons all around them and to begin to understand why they matter
- To have the space to build castles and zoos and villages and cities, and to populate them with dinosaurs and sheep and cars and people - and make them do as they
want
- To be able to leave these creations there till the next day and carry on the game and then knock them all down and start again
- To curl up quietly in a corner and be transported into the other worlds of a beautiful picture book or to create their own other worlds in a role-play corner - today it's a shop, and tomorrow it's a cave at the bottom of the sea
- To write signs and notices for keeping adults out - or for inviting them to join in.
'Play and the Revised EYFS' shows how truly enabling environments ensure that children's play quite naturally fulfils the EYFS learning and development requirements.
Each section describes an activity and sets out the cross-curricular learning that stems from the activity.
To download the document, visit: www.communityplaythings.co.uk and to order the accompanying PowerPoint training pack, call 0800 387 457.
