Guidance

Development Matters

Updated 4 September 2023

Applies to England

Introduction

No job is more important than working with children in the early years.

Development Matters is for all early years practitioners, for childminders and staff in nurseries, nursery schools, and nursery and reception classes in school. It offers a top-level view of how children develop and learn. It can help you to design an effective early years curriculum, building on the strengths and meeting the needs of the children you work with. It guides but does not replace, professional judgement.

The curriculum consists of everything you want children to experience, learn and be able to do. It must meet the requirements of the educational programmes in the statutory framework for the early years foundation stage (EYFS). These are included throughout Development Matters for ease of reference.

How to use this guidance

This guidance sets out the pathways of children’s development in broad ages and stages. The actual learning of young children is not so neat and orderly. For that reason, accurate and proportionate assessment is vital. It helps you to make informed decisions about what a child needs to learn and be able to do next. It is not designed to be used as a tick list for generating lots of data.

You can use your professional knowledge to help children make progress without needing to record lots of next steps The guidance can help you check that children are secure in all the earlier steps of learning before you look at their ‘age band’. Depth in learning matters much more than moving from one band to the next or trying to cover everything. For example, it is important to give a child many opportunities to deepen their understanding of numbers to 5. There is no value in rushing to 10.

Children who may struggle in their early learning are not ‘low ability’. We do not know what their potential might be. Every child can make progress with the right support.

The observation checkpoints can help you to notice whether a child is at risk of falling behind. You can make all the difference by acting quickly. By monitoring a child’s progress closely, you can make the right decisions about what sort of extra help is needed. Through sensitive dialogue with parents (‘parent’ is used throughout this document to refer to parents, carers, and guardians), you can understand the child better and offer helpful suggestions to support learning at home within the family.

Health colleagues, like health visitors or speech and language therapists, offer vital support to this work.

Development Matters is not a long list of everything a child needs to know and do. It guides but does not replace, your professional judgement.

Reforms to the early years foundation stage

The early years foundation stage puts early language at the heart of a broad curriculum, and encourages you to spend time on quality interactions with children rather than on unnecessary assessment paperwork.

Why high-quality early years education is important

Development Matters includes more guidance about children’s communication and language. Language is the foundation of children’s thinking and learning.

High-quality early years education, with a strong focus on communication, is good for every child. It is especially positive for disadvantaged children. By reducing workload expectations, this guidance can free up time. You can use that time to help children who are struggling with their learning. This can stop gaps in learning from opening and widening. Gaps by the end of the early years will, on average, double by the end of primary schooling. The early years are the crucial years for making a difference.

The EYFS is about how children learn, as well as what they learn. Children need opportunities to develop their own play and independent exploration. This is enjoyable and motivating. They also need adults to ‘scaffold’ their learning by giving them just enough help to achieve something they could not do independently. Helping children to think, discuss and plan ahead is important, like gathering the materials they need to make a den before they start building. These are ways of helping children to develop the characteristics of effective learning.

When children are at earlier stages of development than expected, it is important to notice what they enjoy doing and also find out where their difficulties may lie. They need extra help so that they become secure in the earlier stages of development. It is not helpful to wait for them to become ‘ready’. For example, children who are not speaking in sentences are not going to be able to write in sentences. They will need lots of stimulating experiences to help them develop their communication. That’s why the time you spend listening to them and having conversations with them is so important.

Children learn and develop more from birth to 5 years old than at any other time in their lives. If children are at risk of falling behind the majority, the best time to help them to catch up and keep up is in the early years. Every child can make progress if they are given the right support.

When we give every child the best start in their early years, we give them what they need today. We also set them up with every chance of success tomorrow.

Seven key features of effective practice

1. The best for every child

All children deserve to have an equal chance of success.

High-quality early education is good for all children. It is especially important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

When they start school, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are, on average, 4 months^{[footnote 1]} behind their peers. We need to do more to narrow that gap.

Children who have lived through difficult experiences can begin to grow stronger when they experience high-quality early education and care.

High-quality early education and care is inclusive. Children’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are identified quickly. All children promptly receive any extra help they need, so they can progress well in their learning.

2. High-quality care

The child’s experience must always be central to the thinking of every practitioner.

Babies, toddlers and young children thrive when they are loved and well cared for.

High-quality care is consistent. Every practitioner needs to enjoy spending time with young children.

Effective practitioners are responsive to children and babies. They notice when a baby looks towards them and gurgles and respond with pleasure.

Practitioners understand that toddlers are learning to be independent, so they will sometimes get frustrated.

Practitioners know that starting school, and all the other transitions in the early years, are big steps for small children.

3. The curriculum: what we want children to learn

The curriculum is a top-level plan of everything the early years setting wants the children to learn.

Planning to help every child to develop their language is vital.

The curriculum needs to be ambitious. Careful sequencing will help children to build their learning over time.

Young children’s learning is often driven by their interests. Plans need to be flexible.

Babies and young children do not develop in a fixed way. Their development is like a spider’s web with many strands, not a straight line.

Depth in early learning is much more important than covering lots of things in a superficial way.

4. Pedagogy: helping children to learn

Children are powerful learners. Every child can make progress in their learning, with the right help.

Effective pedagogy is a mix of different approaches. Children learn through play, by adults modelling, by observing each other, and through guided learning and direct teaching.

Practitioners carefully organise enabling environments for high-quality play. Sometimes, they make time and space available for children to invent their own play. Sometimes, they join in to sensitively support and extend children’s learning.

Children in the early years also learn through group work, when practitioners guide their learning.

Older children need more of this guided learning.

A well-planned learning environment, indoors and outside, is an important aspect of pedagogy.

5. Assessment: checking what children have learnt

Assessment is about noticing what children can do and what they know. It is not about lots of data and evidence.

Effective assessment requires practitioners to understand child development. Practitioners also need to be clear about what they want children to know and be able to do.

Accurate assessment can highlight whether a child has a special educational need and needs extra help.

Before assessing children, it’s a good idea to think about whether the assessments will be useful.

Assessment should not take practitioners away from the children for long periods of time.

6. Self-regulation and executive function

Executive function includes the child’s ability to:

• hold information in mind
• focus their attention
• think flexibly
• inhibit impulsive behaviour

These abilities contribute to the child’s growing ability to self-regulate:

• concentrate their thinking
• plan what to do next
• monitor what they are doing and adapt
• regulate strong feelings
• be patient for what they want
• bounce back when things get difficult.

Language development is central to self-regulation: children use language to guide their actions and plans.

Pretend play gives many opportunities for children to focus their thinking, persist and plan ahead.

7. Partnership with parents

It is important for parents and early years settings to have a strong and respectful partnership. This sets the scene for children to thrive in the early years.

This includes listening regularly to parents and giving parents clear information about their children’s progress.

The help that parents give their children at home has a very significant impact on their learning.

Some children get much less support for their learning at home than others. By knowing and understanding all the children and their families, settings can offer extra help to those who need it most.

It is important to encourage all parents to chat, play and read with their children.

The characteristics of effective teaching and learning

In planning and guiding what children learn, practitioners must reflect on the different rates at which children are developing and adjust their practice appropriately.

3 characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:

• playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’
• active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
• creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things

Playing and exploring

Children will be learning to:

• realise that their actions have an effect on the world, so they want to keep repeating them
• plan and think ahead about how they will explore or play with objects
• guide their own thinking and actions by referring to visual aids or by talking to themselves while playing, for example, a child doing a jigsaw might whisper under their breath: “Where does that one go? – I need to find the big horse next.”
• make independent choices
• bring their own interests and fascinations into early years settings - this helps them to develop their learning
• respond to new experiences that you bring to their attention

Examples of how to support this

Encourage babies’ exploration of the world around them. Suggestions: investigating the feel of their key person’s hair or reaching for a blanket in their cot.

Offer open-ended resources like large smooth shells and pebbles, blocks and lengths of fabric for babies and toddlers to play freely with, outdoors and inside.

When playing with blocks encourage children to discuss what they will make before and while making it, or draw a picture before building.

Visual aids can help children to keep track of what they need to do next, for example counting on their fingers or referring to a series of pictures on the wall to remind them what they must do before lunch.

Verbal mental aids include providing a sensitive commentary on what a child is doing. You might comment: “I see you are looking for the biggest pieces first’” or ask “how well do you think that’s going?”

Children may copy your commentary by talking out loud to themselves first. In time, this will develop into their ‘inner voice’.

Provide a well-organised environment so that children know where materials and tools are and can access them easily.

Provide enough materials and arrange spaces so that children can collaborate and learn alongside peers. Give children enough time and space to engage in large-scale projects that may continue over several days.

Explore the reasons behind children’s choices, for example, ‘I’m interested that you’re using a paintbrush rather than a pencil to make your picture.’

Extend children’s interests by providing stimulating resources for them to play with, on their own and with peers, in response to their fascinations.

Join in with children’s play and investigations, without taking over. Talk with them about what they are doing and what they are noticing.

Provide appropriate non-fiction books and links to information online to help them follow their interests.

Regularly provide new materials and interesting things for children to explore and investigate.

Introduce children to different styles of music and art. Give them the opportunity to observe changes in living things in the setting, and around the local environment. Take children to new places, like a local theatre, a museum, a National Trust heritage site, a fire station, a farm or an elderly people’s home.

Involve children in making decisions about science experiments: what might we feed the plants to make them grow? Why do you think fizzy water might work? How will we know if one is growing faster than another?’.

Active learning

Children will be learning to:

• participate in routines, such as going to their cot or mat when they want to sleep
• begin to predict sequences because they know routines, for example, they may anticipate lunch when they see the table is set, or get their coat when the door to the outdoor area opens
• show goal-directed behaviour, for example:
  • babies may pull themselves up by using the edges of a low table to reach for a toy on top of the table
  • toddlers might turn a storage box upside down so they can stand on it and reach up for an object
• begin to correct their mistakes themselves, for example, instead of using increasing force to push a puzzle piece into the slot, they try another piece to see if it will fit
• keep on trying when things are difficult

Examples of how to support this

Help babies, toddlers and young children feel safe, secure and treasured as individuals.

The key person approach gives children a secure base of care and affection, together with supportive routines. That can help them to explore and play confidently.

Provide furniture and boxes at the right height to encourage babies to pull themselves up and reach for objects.

Opportunities to play and explore freely, indoors and outside, are fun. They also help babies, toddlers and young children to develop their self-regulation as they enjoy hands-on learning and sometimes talk about what they are doing.

Help young children to develop by accepting the pace of their learning. Give them plenty of time to make connections and repeat activities.

Help children to think about what will support them most, taking care not to offer help too soon. The following strategies will help children at different times, depending on their confidence, how much previous experience they’ve had with an activity, and how motivated, or distracted, they are:

• repeating something hard on their own, learning through trial and error
• asking a friend or an adult for help
• watching an adult or another child, modelling what to do, or listening to their guidance

At times, children respond well to open-ended activities which they choose. Other times, they benefit from a supportive structure established by an adult. It is important to provide both kinds of opportunities.

Adults can teach children to use self-calming to help them deal with intense emotions. For example, you could introduce a ‘calming jar’. Or you could introduce ‘zones of regulation’. These can help children to become more aware of their emotions and think about how to calm themselves.

Creating and thinking critically

Children will be learning to:

• take part in simple pretend play, for example, they might use an object like a brush to pretend to brush their hair, or ‘drink’ from a pretend cup
• sort materials, for example, at tidy-up time, children know how to put different construction materials in separate baskets
• use pretend play to think beyond the ‘here and now’ and to understand another perspective, for example, a child role-playing the billy goats gruff might suggest that “Maybe the troll is lonely and hungry? That’s why he is fierce.”
• know more, so feel confident about coming up with their own ideas
• make more links between those ideas
• concentrate on achieving something that’s important to them - they are increasingly able to control their attention and ignore distractions

Children will also be learning to:

• review their progress as they try to achieve a goal and check how well they are doing
• solve real problems

For example, to share 9 strawberries between 3 friends, they might put one in front of each, then a second, and finally a third. Finally, they might check at the end that everyone has the same number of strawberries.

Examples of how to support this

Help babies, toddlers and young children to find their own ideas by providing open-ended resources that can be used in many ways.

Encourage, support and enjoy children’s creative thinking as they find new ways to do things.

Children need consistent routines and plenty of time so that play is not constantly interrupted. It is important to be reflective and flexible.

Help children to extend their ideas through sustained discussion that goes beyond what they, and you, have noticed. Consider ‘how’ and ‘why’ things happen, and ‘what might happen next.’

Help children to come up with their own ideas and explanations. For example, you could look together at woodlice and caterpillars outdoors with the magnifying app on a tablet. You could ask: “What’s similar about caterpillars and other insects?” You could use and explain terms like ‘antennae’ and ‘thorax’.

Offer children many different experiences and opportunities to play freely and to explore and investigate. Make time and space for children to become deeply involved in imaginative play, indoors and outside.

Help children to reflect on and talk about their learning through using photographs and learning journeys. Share in children’s pride about their achievements and their enjoyment of special memories.

Suggestion: you could prompt a conversation with questions like: “Do you remember when…?”, “How would you do that now?” or “I wonder what you were thinking then?”

Communication and language

The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. Children’s back-and-forth interactions from an early age form the foundations for language and cognitive development.

The number and quality of the conversations they have with adults and peers throughout the day in a language-rich environment is crucial. By commenting on what children are interested in or doing, and echoing back what they say with new vocabulary added, practitioners will build children’s language effectively.

Reading frequently to children, and engaging them actively in stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems, and then providing them with extensive opportunities to use and embed new words in a range of contexts, will give children the opportunity to thrive.

Through conversation, storytelling and role play, where children share their ideas with support and modelling from their teacher, and sensitive questioning that invites them to elaborate, children become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language structures.

English as an additional language

Speaking more than one language has lots of advantages for children. It is the norm in many countries around the world.

Children will learn English from a strong foundation in their home language. It is important for you to encourage families to use their home language for linguistic as well as cultural reasons.

Children learning English will typically go through a quiet phase when they do not say very much and may then use words in both languages in the same sentence. Talk to parents about what language they speak at home, try and learn a few key words and celebrate multilingualism in your setting.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• turn towards familiar sounds - they are also startled by loud noises and accurately locate the source of a familiar person’s voice, such as their key person or a parent
• gaze at faces, copying facial expressions and movements like sticking out their tongue
• make eye contact for longer periods
• watch someone’s face as they talk
• copy what adults do, taking ‘turns’ in conversations (through babbling) and activities
• try to copy adult speech and lip movements
• enjoy singing, music and toys that make sounds
• recognise and are calmed by a familiar and friendly voice
• listen and respond to a simple instruction

Examples of how to support this

Babies and toddlers thrive when you show a genuine interest in them, join in and respond warmly.

Using exaggerated intonation and a sing-song voice (infant-directed speech) helps babies tune in to language.

Regularly using the babies and toddlers’ names helps them to pay attention to what the practitioner is saying for example, “Chloe, have some milk.” It is important to minimise background noise, so do not have music playing all the time.

Babies love singing and music. Sing a range of songs and play a wide range of different types of music. Move with babies to music.

Babies and toddlers love action rhymes and games like ‘Peepo’. As they begin to join in with the words and the actions, they are developing their attention and listening. Allow babies time to anticipate words and actions in favourite songs.

Observation checkpoint

Around 6 months, does the baby respond to familiar voices, turn to their own name and ‘take turns’ in conversations with babbling?

Around 12 months, does the baby ‘take turns’ by babbling and using single words? Does the baby point to things and use gestures to show things to adults and share interests?

Around 18 months, is the toddler listening and responding to a simple instruction like: “Adam, put on your shoes?”

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• make sounds to get attention in different ways (for example, crying when hungry or unhappy, making gurgling sounds, laughing, cooing or babbling)
• babble, using sounds like ‘baba’, ‘mamama’
• use gestures like waving and pointing to communicate
• reach or point to something they want while making sounds
• copy your gestures and words
• constantly babble and use single words during play
• use intonation, pitch and changing volume when ‘talking’

Examples of how to support this

Take time and ‘tune in’ to the messages babies are giving you through their vocalisations, body language and gestures.

When babies and toddlers are holding and playing with objects, say what they are doing for example: “You’ve got the ball” and “Shake the rattle.”

Where you can, give meaning to the baby’s gestures and pointing for example: “Oh, I see, you want the teddy.”

Chat with babies and toddlers all the time, but be careful not to overwhelm them with talk. Allow babies and toddlers to take the lead and then respond to their communications.

Wait for the baby or toddler to speak or communicate with a sound or a look first – so that they are leading the conversation. When responding, expand on what has been said (for example, add a word). If a baby says “bottle”, you could say “milk bottle”. In a natural way, use the same word repeatedly in different contexts: “Look, a bottle of milk– oh, you’ve finished your bottle.” Adding a word while a toddler is playing gives them the model of an expanded phrase. It also keeps the conversation on their topic of interest. Suggestion: if they say “bag”, you could say: “Yes, daddy’s bag”.

Observation checkpoint

Is the baby using speech sounds (babbling) to communicate with adults?

Around 12 months, is the baby beginning to use single words like mummum, dada, tete (teddy)?

Around 15 months, can the baby say around 10 words (they may not all be clear)?

Around 18 months, is the toddler using a range of adult-like speech patterns (jargon) and at least 20 clear words?

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• understand single words in context – ‘cup’, ‘milk’, ‘daddy’
• understand frequently used words such as ‘all gone’, ‘no’ and ‘bye-bye’

Examples of how to support this

You can help babies with their understanding by using gestures and context. Suggestion: point to the cup and say “cup”.

Talking about what you are doing helps babies learn language in context. Suggestion: “I’m pouring out your milk into the cup”.

Observation checkpoint

Around 12 months, can the baby choose between 2 objects: “Do you want the ball or the car?”

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• understand simple instructions like “give to nanny” or “stop”
• recognise and point to objects if asked about them

Examples of how to support this

Singing, action rhymes and sharing books give children rich opportunities to understand new words.

Play with groups of objects (different small world animals, or soft toys, or tea and picnic sets). Make sure you name things whilst playing, and talk about what you are doing.

Observation checkpoint

Around 18 months, does the toddler understand lots of different single words and some two-word phrases, such as “give me” or “shoes on”?

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• generally focus on an activity of their own choice and find it difficult to be directed by an adult
• listen to other people’s talk with interest but can easily be distracted by other things
• make themselves understood and can become frustrated when they cannot
• start to say how they are feeling, using words as well as actions
• start to develop conversation, often jumping from topic to topic
• develop pretend play - ‘putting the baby to sleep’ or ‘driving the car to the shops’

Examples of how to support this

Help toddlers and young children to focus their attention by using their name: “Fatima, put your coat on”.

You can help toddlers and young children listen and pay attention by using gestures like pointing and facial expressions.

You can help toddlers who are having tantrums by being calm and reassuring.

Help toddlers to express what’s angering them by suggesting words to describe their emotions, like ‘sad’ or ‘angry’. You can help further by explaining in simple terms why you think they may be feeling that emotion.

Make time to connect with babies, toddlers and young children. Tune in and listen to them and join in with their play, indoors and outside.

Allow plenty of time to have conversations together, rather than busily rushing from one activity to the next. When you know a young child well, it is easier to understand them and talk about their family life. For example: “OK, I see. You went to the shops with Aunty Maya”.

Observation checkpoint

By around 2 years old, is the child showing an interest in what other children are playing and sometimes joins in?

By around 3 years old, can the child shift from one task to another if you get their attention? Using the child’s name can help: “Jason, please can you stop now? We’re tidying up”.

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• use the speech sounds p, b, m, w
• pronounce:
  • l/r/w/y
  • f/th
  • s/sh/ch/dz/j
  • multi-syllabic words such as ‘banana’ and ‘computer’

Examples of how to support this

Toddlers and young children will pronounce some words incorrectly. Instead of correcting them, reply to what they say and use the words they have mispronounced. Children will then learn from your positive model, without losing the confidence to speak.

Toddlers and young children sometimes hesitate and repeat sounds and words when thinking about what to say.

Listen patiently. Do not say the words for them. If the child or parents are distressed or worried by this, contact a speech and language therapist for advice.

Encourage children to talk. Do not use too many questions - 4 comments to every question is a useful guide.

Observation checkpoint

Towards their second birthday, can the child use up to 50 words?

Is the child beginning to put 2 or 3 words together: “more milk”?

Is the child frequently asking questions, such as the names of people and objects?

Towards their third birthday, can the child use around 300 words? These words include descriptive language. They include words for time (for example, ‘now’ and ‘later’), space (for example, ‘over there’) and function (for example, they can tell you a sponge is for washing).

Is the child linking up to 5 words together?

Is the child using pronouns (‘me’, ‘him’, ‘she’), and using plurals and prepositions (‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’) – these may not always be used correctly to start with.

Can the child follow instructions with 3 keywords like: “Can you wash dolly’s face?”

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• listen to simple stories and understand what is happening, with the help of the pictures
• identify familiar objects and properties for practitioners when they are described, for example, ‘Katie’s coat’, ‘blue car’, ‘shiny apple’
• understand and act on longer sentences like ‘make teddy jump’ or ‘find your coat’
• understand simple questions about ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ (but generally not ‘why’)

Examples of how to support this

Share picture books every day with children. Encourage them to talk about the pictures and the story. Comment on the pictures – for example: “It looks like the boy is a bit worried…” and wait for their response. You might also ask them about the pictures: “I wonder what the caterpillar is doing now?”

Books with just pictures and no words can especially encourage conversations.

Tell children the names of things they do not know and choose books that introduce interesting new vocabulary to them.

When appropriate, you can check children’s understanding by asking them to point to particular pictures. Or ask them to point to particular objects in a picture. For example, “Can you show me the big boat?”

When talking with young children, give them plenty of processing time (at least 10 seconds). This gives them time to understand what you have said and think of their reply.

Observation checkpoint

Around the age of 2, can the child understand many more words than they can say – between 200 to 500 words?

Around the age of 2, can the child understand simple questions and instructions like: “Where’s your hat?” or “What’s the boy in the picture doing?”

Around the age of 3, can the child show that they understand action words by pointing to the right picture in a book. For example: “Who’s jumping?”

Watch out for children whose speech is not easily understood by unfamiliar adults. Monitor their progress and consider whether a hearing test might be needed.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• enjoy listening to longer stories and can remember much of what happens
• pay attention to more than one thing at a time, which can be difficult

Examples of how to support this

Offer children at least a daily story time as well as sharing books throughout the session.

If they are busy in their play, children may not be able to switch their attention and listen to what you say. When you need to, help young children to switch their attention from what they are doing to what you are saying.

Give them a clear prompt. Suggestion: say the child’s name and then: “Please stop and listen”.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• use a wider range of vocabulary
• understand a question or instruction that has 2 parts, such as: “Get your coat and wait at the door”
• understand ‘why’ questions, like: “Why do you think the caterpillar got so fat?”

Examples of how to support this

Extend children’s vocabulary, explaining unfamiliar words and concepts and making sure children have understood what they mean through stories and other activities. These should include words and concepts which occur frequently in books and other contexts but are not used every day by many young children. For example, use scientific vocabulary when talking about the parts of a flower or an insect, or different types of rocks. Examples from ‘The Gruffalo’ include: ‘stroll’, ‘roasted’, ‘knobbly’, ‘wart’ and ‘feast’.

Provide children with a rich language environment by sharing books and activities with them. Encourage children to talk about what is happening and give their own ideas. High-quality picture books are a rich source for learning new vocabulary and more complex forms of language: “Excuse me, I’m very hungry. Do you think I could have tea with you?”

Shared book-reading is a powerful way of having extended conversations with children. It helps children to build their vocabulary.

Offer children lots of interesting things to investigate, like different living things. This will encourage them to ask questions.

Observation checkpoint

Around the age of 3, can the child shift from one task to another if you fully obtain their attention, for example, by using their name?

Around the age of 4, is the child using sentences of 4 to 6 words – “I want to play with cars” or “What’s that thing called?”?

Can the child use sentences joined up with words like ‘because’, ‘or’, ‘and’? For example, “I like ice cream because it makes my tongue shiver”.

Is the child using the future and past tense: “I am going to the park” and “I went to the shop”? Can the child answer simple ‘why’ questions?

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• sing a large repertoire of songs
• know many rhymes, be able to talk about familiar books, and be able to tell a long story
• develop their communication but may continue to have problems with irregular tenses and plurals, such as ‘runned’ for ‘ran’, ‘swimmed’ for ‘swam’
• develop their pronunciation but may have problems saying:
  • some sounds: r, j, th, ch, and sh
  • multi-syllabic words such as ‘pterodactyl’, ‘planetarium’ or ‘hippopotamus’
• use longer sentences of 4 to 6 words

Examples of how to support this

Consider which core books, songs and rhymes you want children to become familiar with and grow to love. The BookTrust’s ‘Bookfinder’ website can help you to pick high-quality books.

Activities planned around those core books will help the children to practise the vocabulary and language from those books. It will also support their creativity and play.

Outdoor play themed around ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ might lead to the children creating their own ‘hunts’ and inventing their own rhymes.

Children may use ungrammatical forms like ‘I swimmed’. Instead of correcting them, recast what the child said. For example: “How lovely that you swam in the sea on holiday”.

When children have difficulties with correct pronunciation, reply naturally to what they say. Pronounce the word correctly so they hear the correct model.

Expand on children’s phrases. For example, if a child says, “going out shop”, you could reply: “Yes, Henna is going to the shop”. As well as adding language, add new ideas. For example: “I wonder if they’ll get the 26 bus?”

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• be able to express a point of view and to debate when they disagree with an adult or a friend, using words as well as actions
• start a conversation with an adult or a friend and continue it for many turns
• use talk to organise themselves and their play: “Let’s go on a bus… you sit there… I’ll be the driver”

Examples of how to support this

Model language that promotes thinking and challenges children: “I can see that’s empty – I wonder what happened to the snail that used to be in that shell?”

Open-ended questions like “I wonder what would happen if….?” encourage more thinking and longer responses. Sustained shared thinking is especially powerful. This is when 2 or more individuals (adult and child, or children) ‘work together’ in an intellectual way to:

• solve a problem
• clarify a concept
• evaluate activities
• extend a narrative

Help children to elaborate on how they are feeling: “You look sad. Are you upset because Jasmin doesn’t want to do the same thing as you?”

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• understand how to listen carefully and why listening is important
• learn new vocabulary
• use new vocabulary throughout the day

Examples of how to support this

Promote and model active listening skills: “Wait a minute, I need to get into a good position for listening, I can’t see you. Let’s be quiet so I can concentrate on what you’re saying.”

Signal when you want children to listen: “Listen carefully now for how many animals are on the broom.” Link listening with learning: “I could tell you were going to say the right answer, you were listening so carefully.”

Identify new vocabulary before planning activities, for example, changes in materials: ‘dissolving’, ‘drying’, ‘evaporating’, in music: ‘percussion’, ‘tambourine’.

Bring in objects, pictures and photographs to talk about, for example, vegetables to taste, smell and feel. Discuss which category the word is in, for example: “A cabbage is a kind of vegetable. It’s a bit like a sprout but much bigger”. Have fun saying the word in an exaggerated manner.

Use picture cue cards to talk about an object: “What colour is it? Where would you find it? What shape is it? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What does it taste like?”

Model words and phrases relevant to the area being taught, deliberately and systematically: “I’m thrilled that everyone’s on time today”, “I can see that you’re delighted with your new trainers”, “Stop shrieking, you’re hurting my ears!”, “What a downpour – I’ve never seen so much rain!”, “It looks as if the sun has caused the puddles to evaporate”, “Have you ever heard such a booming voice?” Use the vocabulary repeatedly throughout the week. Keep a list of previously taught vocabulary and review it in different contexts.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• ask questions to find out more and to check they understand what has been said to them
• articulate their ideas and thoughts in well-formed sentences
• connect one idea or action to another using a range of connectives
• describe events in some detail
• use talk to help work out problems and organise thinking and activities, and to explain how things work and why they might happen
• develop social phrases

Examples of how to support this

Show genuine interest in knowing more: “This looks amazing, I need to know more about this.”

Think out loud, ask questions to check your understanding; make sure children can answer who, where and when questions before you move on to why and ‘how do you know’ questions: “I wonder why this jellyfish is so dangerous? Ahh, it has poison in its tentacles.”

Use complete sentences in your everyday talk.

Help children build sentences using new vocabulary by rephrasing what they say and structuring their responses using sentence starters.

Narrate your own and children’s actions: “I’ve never seen so many beautiful bubbles, I can see all the colours of the rainbow in them.”

Build upon their incidental talk: “Your tower is definitely the tallest I’ve seen all week. Do you think you’ll make it any higher?”

Ask open questions - “How did you make that? Why does the wheel move so easily? What will happen if you do that?”

Instead of correcting, model accurate irregular grammar such as past tense, plurals, complex sentences: “That’s right: you drank your milk quickly; you were quicker than Darren.”

Narrate events and actions, for example, “I knew it must be cold outside because he was putting on his coat and hat.”

Remind children of previous events: “Do you remember when we forgot to wear our raincoats last week? It poured so much that we got drenched!”

Extend their thinking: “You’ve thought really hard about building your tower, but how will you stop it from falling down?”

Make deliberate mistakes highlighting to children that sometimes you might get it wrong: “It’s important to get things in the right order so that people know what I’m talking about. Listen carefully to see if I have things in the right order: ‘last week…’

Use sequencing words with emphasis in your own stories: “Before school, I had a lovely big breakfast, then I had a biscuit at break time and after that, I had 2 pieces of fruit after lunch. I’m so full!”

Think out loud about how to work things out. Encourage children to talk about a problem together and come up with ideas for how to solve it.

Give children problem-solving words and phrases to use in their explanations: ‘so that’, ‘because’, ‘I think it’s…’, ‘you could…’, ‘it might be…’

Model talk routines throughout the day. For example, arriving in school: “Good morning, how are you?”

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• engage in storytimes
• listen to and talk about stories to build familiarity and understanding
• retell the story, once they have developed a deep familiarity with the text, some as exact repetition and some in their own words
• use new vocabulary in different contexts
• engage in non-fiction books
• listen to and talk about selected non-fiction to develop a deep familiarity with new knowledge and vocabulary

Examples of how to support this

Timetable a storytime at least once a day. Draw up a list of books that you enjoy reading aloud to children, including traditional and modern stories. Choose books that will develop their vocabulary. Display quality books in attractive book corners.

Send home familiar and good-quality books for parents to read aloud and talk about with their children. Show parents how to share stories with their children.

Read and re-read selected stories.

Show enjoyment of the story using your voice and manner to make the meaning clear. Use different voices for the narrator and each character. Make asides, commenting on what is happening in a story: “That looks dangerous – I’m sure they’re all going to fall off that broom!”

Link events in a story to your own experiences. Talk about the plot and the main problem in the story. Identify the main characters in the story, and talk about their feelings, actions and motives.

Take on different roles in imaginative play, to interact and negotiate with people in longer conversations. Practise possible conversations between characters.

Make familiar books available for children to share at school and at home.

Make time for children to tell each other stories they have heard, or to visitors.

Have fun with phrases from the story through the day: “I searched for a pencil, but no pencil could be found.” Explain new vocabulary in the context of a story, rather than in word lists.

Read aloud books to children that will extend their knowledge of the world and illustrate a current topic. Select books containing photographs and pictures, for example, places in different weather conditions and seasons.

Re-read some books so children learn the language necessary to talk about what is happening in each illustration and relate it to their own lives. Make the books available for children to share at school and at home.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• listen carefully to rhymes and songs, paying attention to how they sound
• learn rhymes, poems and songs

Examples of how to support this

Show your enjoyment of poems using your voice and manner to give emphasis to carefully chosen words and phrases.

Model noticing how some words sound: “That poem was about a frog on a log, those words sound a bit the same at the end don’t they? They rhyme.”

In poems and rhymes with very regular rhythm patterns, pause before the rhyming word to allow children to join in or predict the word coming next.

Encourage children to have fun with rhyme, even if their suggestions don’t make complete sense.

Choose a few interesting longer words from the poem, rhyme or song and clap out their beat structure, helping children to join in with the correct number of ‘claps’.

Select traditional and contemporary poems and rhymes to read aloud to children. Help children to join in with refrains and learn some verses by heart using call and response.

When singing songs by heart, talk about words in repeated phrases from within a refrain or verse so that word boundaries are noticed and not blurred: “Listen carefully, what words can you hear? Oncesuppona time: once – upon – a – time.”

Personal, social and emotional development

Children’s personal, social and emotional development (PSED) is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives, and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Underpinning their personal development are the important attachments that shape their social world. Strong, warm and supportive relationships with adults enable children to learn how to understand their own feelings and those of others.

Children should be supported to manage emotions, develop a positive sense of self, set themselves simple goals, have confidence in their own abilities, to persist and wait for what they want and direct attention as necessary.

Through adult modelling and guidance, they will learn how to look after their bodies, including healthy eating, and manage personal needs independently.

Through supported interaction with other children, they learn how to make good friendships, co-operate and resolve conflicts peaceably.

These attributes will provide a secure platform from which children can achieve at school and in later life.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• find ways to calm themselves, through being calmed and comforted by their key person
• establish their sense of self
• express preferences and decisions, they also try new things and start establishing their autonomy
• engage with others through gestures, gaze and talk
• use that engagement to achieve a goal, for example, gesture towards their cup to say they want a drink

Examples of how to support this

When settling a baby or toddler into nursery, the top priority is for the key person to develop a strong and loving relationship with the young child. Learn from the family about what they do to soothe their child and what to look out for – for example, a baby who scratches at their head when they are getting tired.

Find out what calms a baby – rocking, cuddling or singing. Make sure babies and toddlers can get hold of their comfort object when they need it.

Explain to parents that once babies establish ‘object permanence’, they become more aware of the presence or absence of their parents. Object permanence means knowing that something continues to exist even when out of sight. This can make separations much more distressing and difficult between 6 to 24 months.

Babies develop a sense of self by interacting with others, and by exploring their bodies and objects around them, inside and outdoors.

Respond and build on babies’ expressions and gestures, playfully exploring the idea of self and other. Point to your own nose, eyes and mouth, point to the baby’s.

Be positive and interested in what babies do as they develop their confidence in trying new things.

Help toddlers and young children to make informed choices from a limited range of options. Enable children to choose which song to sing from a set of 4 song cards, by pointing. Enable children to choose whether they want milk or water at snack time.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• find ways of managing transitions, for example, from their parent to their key person
• thrive as they develop self-assurance
• look back as they crawl or walk away from their key person
• look for clues about how to respond to something interesting
• play with increasing confidence on their own and with other children, because they know their key person is nearby and available
• feel confident when taken out around the local neighbourhood and enjoy exploring new places with their key person

Examples of how to support this

Support children as they find their own different ways to manage feelings of sadness when their parents leave them. Some children might need to hold onto a special object from home to feel strong and confident in the setting. Some might need to snuggle in and be comforted by their key person. Some might get busy straight away in their favourite play or with another child they feel close to.

Young children need to feel secure as they manage difficult emotions. Provide consistent and predictable routines, with flexibility when needed.

Provide consistent, warm and responsive care. At first, centre this on the key person. In time, children can develop positive relationships with other adults.

When the key person is not available, make sure that someone familiar provides comfort and support, and carries out intimate care routines.

Acknowledge babies’ and toddlers’ brief need for reassurance as they move away from their key person. Encourage babies and toddlers to explore, indoors and outside. Help them to become more independent by smiling and looking encouraging, for example when a baby keeps crawling towards a rattle.

Arrange resources inside and outdoors to encourage children’s independence and growing self-confidence. Treasure basket play allows babies who can sit up to choose what to play with. Store resources so that children can access them freely, without needing help.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• feel strong enough to express a range of emotions
• grow in independence, rejecting help (“me do it”) - sometimes this leads to feelings of frustration and tantrums
• begin to show ‘effortful control’, for example, waiting for a turn and resisting the strong impulse to grab what they want or push their way to the front
• learn to use the toilet with help, and then independently

Examples of how to support this

Help children to feel emotionally safe with a key person and, gradually, with other members of staff. Show warmth and affection, combined with clear and appropriate boundaries and routines. Develop a spirit of friendly co-operation amongst children and adults.

Encourage children to express their feelings through words like ‘sad’, ‘upset’ or ‘angry’. Toddlers and young children may have periods of time when their favourite word is ‘no’ and when they want to carry out their wishes straight away. Maintain sensible routines and boundaries for children during these testing times. Negative or harsh responses can cause children to feel unduly anxious and emotionally vulnerable.

Offer supervision or work discussion sessions to staff. Staff will need to talk about the strong feelings that children may express. How are practitioners feeling about these and developing their understanding of the children’s feelings?

When appropriate, notice and talk about children’s feelings. For example: “I can see it’s hard to wait, just a minute and then it’s your turn to go down the slide.” Model useful phrases like “Can I have a turn?” or “My turn next.”

You cannot force a child to use the potty or toilet. You need to establish friendly co-operation with the child. That will help them take this important step. Children can generally control their bowels before their bladder.

Notice when young children are ready to begin toilet training and discuss this with their parents:

• they know when they have got a wet or dirty nappy
• they get to know when they are peeing and may tell you they are doing it
• the gap between wetting is at least an hour
• they show they need to pee by fidgeting or going somewhere quiet or hidden
• they know when they need to pee and may say so in advance

Potty training is fastest if you start it when the child is at the last stage.

By the age of 3, 9 out of 10 children are dry most days. All children will have the occasional ‘accident’, though, especially when excited, busy or upset.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• be increasingly able to talk about and manage their emotions
• notice and ask questions about differences, such as skin colour, types of hair, gender, special needs and disabilities, religion and so on
• develop friendships with other children
• safely explore emotions beyond their normal range through play and stories
• talk about their feelings in more elaborated ways: “I’m sad because…” or “I love it when …”

Examples of how to support this

Be open to what children say about differences and answer their questions straightforwardly. Help children develop positive attitudes towards diversity and inclusion.

Help all children to feel that they are valued, and they belong.

Support children to find ways into the play and friendship groups of others. For example, encourage them to stand and watch from the side with you. Talk about what you see, and suggest ways for the child to join in.

Story times with props can engage children in a range of emotions. They can feel the family’s fear as the bear chases them at the end of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. They can feel relief when the Gruffalo is scared away by the mouse.

Recognise, talk about and expand on children’s emotions. For example, you might say: “Sara is smiling. She really wanted a turn with the truck.”

Observational checkpoint

Around 7 months, does the baby respond to their name and respond to the emotions in your voice?

Around 12 months, does the baby start to be shy around strangers and show preferences for certain people and toys?

Around 18 months, is the toddler increasingly curious about their world and wanting to explore it and be noticed by you?

Around the age of 2, does the child start to see themselves as a separate person? For example, do they decide what to play with, what to eat, what to wear?

Between the ages of 2 and 3, does the child start to enjoy the company of other children and want to play with them?

Watch out for children who get extremely upset by certain sounds, smells or tastes, and cannot be calmed. Or children who seem worried, sad or angry for much of the time. You will need to work closely with parents and other agencies to find out more about these developmental difficulties.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• select and use activities and resources, with help when needed - this helps them to achieve a goal they have chosen or one which is suggested to them
• develop their sense of responsibility and membership of a community
• become more outgoing with unfamiliar people, in the safe context of their setting
• show more confidence in new social situations
• play with one or more other children, extending and elaborating play ideas
• find solutions to conflicts and rivalries, for example, accepting that not everyone can be Spider-Man in the game, and suggesting other ideas

Examples of how to support this

Respond to children’s increasing independence and sense of responsibility. As the year proceeds, increase the range of resources and challenges, outdoors and inside. One example of this might be starting the year with light hammers, plastic golf tees and playdough. This equipment will offer children a safe experience of hammering. Wait until the children are ready to follow instructions and use tools safely. Then you could introduce hammers with short handles, nails with large heads, and soft blocks of wood.

Widen the range of activities that children feel confident to take part in, outdoors and inside. Model inviting new activities that encourage children to come over and join in, such as folding paper to make animals, sewing or weaving.

Give children appropriate tasks to carry out such as they can fetch milk cartons or fruit. They can wash up their own plates after their snack.

Invite trusted people into the setting to talk about and show the work they do.

Take children out on short walks around the neighbourhood. When ready, take them on trips to interesting places like a local museum, theatre or place of worship.

Involve children in making decisions about room layout and resources. You could set up a special role-play area in response to children’s fascination with space. Support children to carry out decisions, respecting the wishes of the rest of the group.

Further resource and enrich children’s play, based on their interests. Children often like to talk about their trips to hairdressers and barbers. You could provide items that reflect different ethnicities, such as combs and brushes to stimulate pretend play around their interests.

Notice children who find it difficult to play. They may need extra help to share and manage conflicts. You could set up play opportunities in quiet spaces for them, with just one or 2 other children. You may need to model positive play and cooperation.

Teach children ways of solving conflicts. Model how to listen to someone else and agree a compromise.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• increasingly follow rules, understanding why they are important
• remember rules without needing an adult to remind them
• develop appropriate ways of being assertive
• talk with others to solve conflicts
• talk about their feelings using words like ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’ or ‘worried’
• understand gradually how others might be feeling

Examples of how to support this

Explain why we have rules and display a small number of necessary rules visually as reminders. Display a photo showing a child taking just one piece of fruit at the snack table.

Children who often express angry or destructive feelings need clear boundaries and routines. They also need practitioners to interact calmly and sensitively with them.

Model ways that you calm yourself down, such as stopping and taking a few deep breaths. This can help children to learn ways to calm themselves. If adults are excessively challenging or controlling, children can become more aggressive in the group. They may increasingly ‘act out’ their feelings. For example, when they feel sad, they might hit another child to make that child feel sad as well.

Help children explore situations from different points of view. Talk together about how others might be feeling. Bring these ideas into children’s pretend play: “I wonder how the chicken is feeling, now the fox is creeping up on her?”

Observational checkpoint

Around the age of 3:

• Can the child sometimes manage to share or take turns with others, with adult guidance and understanding ‘yours’ and ‘mine’?
• Can the child settle to some activities for a while?

Around the age of 4:

• Does the child play alongside others or do they always want to play alone?
• Does the child take part in pretend play (for example, being ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’?)
• Does the child take part in other pretend play with different roles – being the Gruffalo, for example?
• Can the child generally negotiate solutions to conflicts in their play?

Watch out for children who seem worried, sad or angry for much of the time, children who seem to flit from one thing to the next or children who seem to stay for over-long periods doing the same thing, and become distressed if they are encouraged to do something different You will need to work closely with parents and other agencies to find out more about these developmental difficulties.

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• be increasingly independent in meeting their own care needs, for example, brushing teeth, using the toilet, washing and drying their hands thoroughly
• make healthy choices about food, drink, activity and toothbrushing

Examples of how to support this

Talk to children about the importance of eating healthily and brushing their teeth. Consider how to support oral health. For example, some settings use a toothbrushing programme.

Talk to children about why it’s important to wash their hands carefully and throughout the day, including before they eat and after they’ve used the toilet.

Observational checkpoint

Look out for children who appear to be overweight or to have poor dental health, where this has not been picked up and acted on at an earlier health check. Discuss this sensitively with parents and involve the child’s health visitor. Adapt activities to suit their particular needs, so all children feel confident to move and take part in physical play.

Most, but not all, children are reliably dry during the day by the age of 4. Support children who are struggling with toilet training, in partnership with their parents. Seek medical advice, if necessary, from a health visitor or GP.

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• see themselves as a valuable individual
• build constructive and respectful relationships
• express their feelings and consider the feelings of others

Examples of how to support this

Make time to get to know the child and their family. Ask parents about the child’s history, likes, dislikes, family members and culture.

Take opportunities in class to highlight a child’s interests, showing you know them and about them.

Make sure children are encouraged to listen to each other as well as the staff.

Ensure children’s play regularly involves sharing and cooperating with friends and other peers. Congratulate children for their kindness to others and express your approval when they help, listen and support each other.

Allow children time in friendship groups as well as other groupings.

Have high expectations for children following instructions, with high levels of support when necessary.

Model positive behaviour and highlight exemplary behaviour of children in class, narrating what was kind and considerate about the behaviour.

Encourage children to express their feelings if they feel hurt or upset using descriptive vocabulary. Help and reassure them when they are distressed, upset or confused.

Undertake specific activities that encourage talk about feelings and their opinions.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• show resilience and perseverance in the face of challenge
• identify and moderate their own feelings socially and emotionally
• think about the perspectives of others

Examples of how to support this

Offer constructive support and recognition of the child’s personal achievements.

Provide opportunities for children to tell each other about their work and play. Help them reflect and self-evaluate their own work.

Help them to develop problem-solving skills by talking through how they, you and others resolved a problem or difficulty. Show that mistakes are an important part of learning and going back is trial and error, not failure.

Help children to set their own goals and to achieve them.

Give children strategies for staying calm in the face of frustration. Talk them through why we take turns, wait politely, tidy up after ourselves and so on.

Encourage them to think about their own feelings and those of others by giving explicit examples of how others might feel in particular scenarios. Give children space to calm down and return to an activity.

Support all children to recognise when their behaviour was not in accordance with the rules and why it is important to respect class rules and behave correctly towards others.

Use dialogic storytime (talking about the ideas arising from the story whilst reading aloud) to discuss books that deal with challenges, explaining how the different characters feel about these challenges and overcome them.

Ask children to explain to others how they thought about a problem or an emotion and how they dealt with it.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• manage their own needs and personal hygiene
• know and talk about the different factors that support their overall health and wellbeing including:
  • regular physical activity
  • healthy eating
  • toothbrushing
  • sensible amounts of ‘screen time’
  • having a good sleep routine
  • being a safe pedestrian

Examples of how to support this

Model practices that support good hygiene, such as insisting on washing hands before snack time.

Narrate your own decisions about healthy foods, highlighting the importance of eating plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Help individual children to develop good personal hygiene. Acknowledge and praise their efforts. Provide regular reminders about thorough handwashing and toileting.

Work with parents and health visitors or the school nurse to help children who are not usually clean and dry through the day.

Talk with children about exercise, healthy eating and the importance of sleep.

Use picture books and other resources to explain the importance of the different aspects of a healthy lifestyle.

Explain to children and model how to travel safely in their local environment, including:

• staying on the pavement
• holding hands and crossing the road when walking
• stopping quickly when scootering and cycling
• being sensitive to other pedestrians

Physical development

Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives. Gross and fine motor experiences develop incrementally throughout early childhood, starting with sensory explorations and the development of a child’s strength, coordination and positional awareness through tummy time, crawling and play movement with both objects and adults.

By creating games and providing opportunities for play both indoors and outdoors, adults can support children to develop their core strength, stability, balance, spatial awareness, coordination and agility.

Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional well-being. Fine motor control and precision help with hand-eye coordination which is later linked to early literacy.

Repeated and varied opportunities to explore and play with small world activities, puzzles, arts and crafts and the practice of using small tools, with feedback and support from adults, allow children to develop proficiency, control and confidence.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• lift their head while lying on their front
• push their chest up with straight arms
• roll over: from front to back, then back to front
• enjoy moving when outdoors and inside
• sit without support
• begin to crawl in different ways and directions
• pull themselves upright and bouncing in preparation for walking
• reach out for objects as co-ordination develops
• pass things from one hand to the other, let go of things and hand them to another person, or drop them

Examples of how to support this

Some babies need constant physical contact, attention and physical intimacy. Respond warmly and patiently to them.

Provide adequate, clean floor space for babies to experience tummy-time and back time. Offer this frequently throughout the day so that they can develop their gross motor skills (kicking, waving, rolling and reaching).

Encourage babies to sit on you, climb over you, and rock, bounce or sway with you.

Notice, cherish and applaud the physical achievements of babies and toddlers.

Give babies time to move freely during care routines, like nappy-changing.

Encourage independence, for example, offer a range of opportunities for children to move by themselves, making their own decisions about direction and speed.

Use everyday, open-ended materials to support overall coordination. Suggestions: sponges and cloths to hold, squash and throw, or wet and squeeze.

Provide a range of surfaces and materials for babies to explore, stimulating touch and all the senses.

Observation checkpoint

Does the baby move with ease and enjoyment?

At around 12 months, can the baby pull to stand from a sitting position and sit down?

Can the baby pick up something small with their first finger and thumb (such as a piece of string)?

Look out for babies and young toddlers who appear underweight, overweight or to have poor dental health. You will need to work closely with parents and health visitors to help improve the child’s health.

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• gradually gain control of their whole body through the continual practice of large movements, such as:
  • waving
  • kicking
  • rolling
  • crawling
  • walking
• clap and stamp to music
• fit themselves into spaces, like tunnels, dens and large boxes, and move around in them
• enjoy starting to kick, throw and catch balls
• build independently with a range of appropriate resources
• begin to walk independently – choosing appropriate props to support at first
• walk, run, jump and climb – and start to use the stairs independently
• spin, roll and independently use ropes and swings (for example, tyre swings)
• sit on a push-along wheeled toy, use a scooter or ride a tricycle
• use large and small motor skills to do things independently, for example, manage buttons and zips, and pour drinks
• show an increasing desire to be independent, such as wanting to feed themselves and dress or undress
• start eating independently and learning how to use a knife and fork

Examples of how to support this

Provide a wide range of opportunities for children to move throughout the day, indoors and outside, alone or with others, with and without apparatus. Include risky and rough and tumble play, as appropriate.

Join in with children’s movement play when invited and if it is appropriate. Then you can show different ways of moving and engaging with the resources.

Help young children learn what physical risks they are confident and able to take. Encourage children to climb unaided and to stop if they do not feel safe. If you lift them onto the apparatus and hold them so they balance, they will not develop a sense of what they can do safely.

Offer outdoor play every day for at least 45 minutes. Include lots of opportunities for children to move freely and explore their surroundings like a slope, a large hole, puddles or a sandpit. Consider wider opportunities for movement. Suggestions include:

• using large moveable resources like hollow blocks
• swinging on monkey bars
• soft play
• climbing walls
• crawling into tunnels and dens

Consider going to suitable local facilities.

As soon as children are able, encourage ‘active travel’ to and from the setting – for example, walking, scooter or bike.

Provide materials and equipment that support physical development – both large and small motor skills. Encourage children to use materials flexibly and combine them in different ways.

Check that children’s clothing and footwear are not too tight or too large.

Provide babies and toddlers with lots of opportunities to feed themselves. Encourage them to dress and undress independently. Be patient, do not rush and take time to talk about what they are doing and why: “It’s a bit cold and wet today – what do we need to wear to keep warm and dry?”

At meal and snack times, encourage children to try a range of foods as they become more independent eaters. Encourage children to help with carrying, pouring drinks, cleaning and sorting.

Encourage young children’s personal decision-making by offering real choices – water or milk, for example. They can comment on how to eat healthily, listen to children’s responses and develop conversations about this.

Encourage good eating habits and behaviours, such as not snatching, sharing and waiting for a second helping.

Observation checkpoint

Around their second birthday, can the toddler run well, kick a ball, and jump with both feet off the ground at the same time?

Around their third birthday, can the child climb confidently, catch a large ball and pedal a tricycle?

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• develop manipulation and control
• explore different materials and tools

Examples of how to support this

Provide different types of paper for children to tear, make marks on and print on.

Provide lots of different things for young children to grasp, hold and explore, like clay, finger paint, spoons, brushes, shells.

Observation checkpoint

Look out for children who find it difficult to sit comfortably on chairs. They may need help to develop their core muscles. You can help them by encouraging them to scoot on sit-down trikes without pedals and jump on soft-play equipment.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• continue to develop their movement, balancing, riding (scooters, trikes and bikes) and ball skills
• go up steps and stairs, or climb up apparatus, using alternate feet
• skip, hop, stand on one leg and hold a pose for a game like musical statues
• use large-muscle movements to wave flags and streamers, paint and make marks

Examples of how to support this

Encourage children to transfer physical skills learnt in one context to another one. Children might first learn to hammer in pegs to mark their forest school boundary, using a mallet. Then, they are ready to learn how to use hammers and nails on the woodwork bench.

Encourage children to paint, chalk or make marks with water on large vertical surfaces. Use walls as well as easels to stimulate large shoulder and arm movements. These experiences help children to ‘cross the mid-line’ of their bodies. When they draw a single line from left to right, say, they do not need to pass the paintbrush from one hand to another or have to move their whole body along.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• start taking part in some group activities which they make up for themselves, or in teams
• increasingly be able to use and remember sequences and patterns of movements which are related to music and rhythm
• match their developing physical skills to tasks and activities in the setting, for example, they decide whether to crawl, walk or run across a plank, depending on its length and width
• choose the right resources to carry out their own plan, for example, choosing a spade to enlarge a small hole they dug with a trowel
• collaborate with others to manage large items, such as moving a long plank safely, carrying large hollow blocks

Examples of how to support this

Lead movement-play activities when appropriate. These will challenge and enhance children’s physical skills and development – using both fixed and flexible resources, indoors and outside.

Model the vocabulary of movement – ‘gallop’, ‘slither’ – and encourage children to use it. Also, model the vocabulary of instruction – ‘follow’, ‘lead’, ‘copy’ – and encourage children to use it.

Encourage children to become more confident, competent, creative and adaptive movers. Then, extend their learning by providing opportunities to play outdoors in larger areas, such as larger parks and spaces in the local area, or through forest or beach school.

Explain why safety is an important factor in handling tools and moving equipment and materials. Have clear and sensible rules for everybody to follow.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• use one-handed tools and equipment, for example, making snips in paper with scissors
• use a comfortable grip with good control when holding pens and pencils
• show a preference for a dominant hand
• be increasingly independent as they get dressed and undressed, for example, putting coats on and doing up zips

Examples of how to support this

You can begin by showing children how to use one-handed tools (scissors and hammers, for example) and then guide them with hand-over-hand help. Gradually reduce the help you are giving and allow the child to use the tool independently.

The tripod grip is a comfortable way to hold a pencil or pen. It gives the child good control. The pen is pinched between the ball of the thumb and the forefinger, supported by the middle finger with the other fingers tucked into the hand. You can help children to develop this grip with specially designed pens and pencils or grippers. Encourage children to pick up small objects like individual gravel stones or tiny bits of chalk to draw with.

Encourage children by helping them, but leaving them to do the last steps, such as pulling up their zip after you have started it off. Gradually reduce your help until the child can do each step on their own.

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• revise and refine the fundamental movement skills they have already acquired such as:
  • rolling
  • crawling
  • walking
  • jumping
  • running
  • hopping
  • skipping
  • climbing
• progress towards a more fluent style of moving, with developing control and grace
• develop the overall body strength, coordination, balance and agility needed to engage successfully with future physical education sessions and other physical disciplines including dance, gymnastics, sport and swimming

Examples of how to support this

Provide regular access to appropriate outdoor space. Ensure there is a range of surfaces to feel, move and balance on, such as grass, earth and bark chippings.

Give children an experience of carrying things up and down on different levels (slopes, hills and steps).

Provide a choice of open-ended materials to play that allows for extended, repeated and regular practising of physical skills like:

• lifting
• carrying
• pushing
• pulling
• constructing
• stacking
• climbing

Provide regular access to floor space indoors for movement.

Ensure that spaces are accessible to children with varying confidence levels, skills and needs.

Provide a wide range of activities to support a broad range of abilities.

Allow less competent and confident children to spend time initially observing and listening, without feeling pressured to join in. Create low-pressure zones where less confident children can practise movement skills on their own, or with one or two others.

Model precise vocabulary to describe movement and directionality, and encourage children to use it.

Provide children with regular opportunities to practise their movement skills alone and with others.

Challenge children with further physical challenges when they are ready, such as climbing higher, running faster and jumping further.

Encourage children to conclude movements in balance and stillness.

Allow for time to be still and quiet, for example, looking up at the sky, or sitting or lying in a den.

Encourage children to be highly active and get out of breath several times every day.

Provide opportunities for children to spin, rock, tilt, fall, slide and bounce.

Provide a range of wheeled resources for children to balance, sit or ride on, or pull and push. Two-wheeled balance bikes and pedal bikes without stabilisers, skateboards, wheelbarrows, prams and carts are all good options.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• develop their small motor skills so that they can use a range of tools competently, safely and confidently - suggested tools include:
  • pencils for drawing and writing
  • paintbrushes
  • scissors
  • knives
  • forks
  • spoons
• use their core muscle strength to achieve a good posture when sitting at a table or sitting on the floor
• combine different movements with ease and fluency

Examples of how to support this

Before teaching children the correct pencil grip and posture for writing, or how to use a knife and fork and cut with scissors, check:

• that children have developed their upper arm and shoulder strength sufficiently and they do not need to move their shoulders as they move their hands and fingers
• that they can move and rotate their lower arms and wrists independently

Help children to develop the core strength and stability they need to support their small motor skills. Encourage and model tummy-crawling, crawling on all fours, climbing, pulling themselves up on a rope and hanging on monkey bars.

Offer children activities to develop and further refine their small motor skills. Suggestions: threading and sewing, woodwork, pouring, stirring, dancing with scarves, using spray bottles, dressing and undressing dolls, planting and caring for plants, playing with small world toys, and making models with junk materials, construction kits and malleable materials like clay.

Regularly review the equipment for children to develop their small motor skills. Is it appropriate for the different levels of skill and confidence of children in the class? Is it challenging for the most dexterous children?

Continuously check how children are holding pencils for writing, scissors and knives and forks. Offer regular, gentle encouragement and feedback. With regular practice, the physical skills children need to eat with a knife and fork and develop an efficient handwriting style will become increasingly automatic.

Provide areas for sitting at a table that is quiet, purposeful and free of distraction.

Give children regular, sensitive reminders about correct posture.

Provide different chairs at the correct height for the range of children in the class, so that their feet are flat on the floor or a footrest. Provide different tables at the correct height for the range of children in the class. The table supports children’s forearms. The top of the table is slightly higher than the height of the child’s elbow flexed to 90 degrees.

Create obstacle courses that demand a range of movements to complete, such as crawling through a tunnel, climbing onto a chair, jumping into a hoop and running and lying on a cushion.

Provide opportunities to move that require quick changes of speed and direction. For example, run around in a circle, stop, change direction and walk on your knees going the other way.

Encourage precision and accuracy when beginning and ending movements.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• confidently and safely use a range of large and small apparatus indoors and outside, alone and in a group
• develop overall body strength, balance, coordination and agility
• further develop and refine a range of ball skills including:
  • throwing
  • catching
  • kicking
  • passing
  • batting
  • aiming
• develop confidence, competence, precision and accuracy when engaging in activities that involve a ball
• develop the foundations of a handwriting style which is fast, accurate and efficient
• further develop the skills they need to manage the school day successfully such as lining up and queuing, and mealtimes

Examples of how to support this

Encourage children to use a range of equipment. These might include:

• wheeled toys
• wheelbarrows
• tumbling mats
• ropes to pull up on
• spinning cones
• tunnels
• tyres
• structures to jump on and off
• den-making materials
• logs and planks to balance on
• A-frames and ladders
• climbing walls
• slides
• monkey bars

Provide a range of different sized ‘balls’ made from familiar materials like socks, paper bags and jumpers that are softer and slower than real balls. Introduce full-sized balls when children are confident to engage with them. Introduce tennis balls, ping pong balls, beach balls and balloons. Introduce a range of resources used to bat, pat and hit a ball, modelling how to do this and giving children plenty of time for practice.

Introduce children to balls games with teams, rules and targets when they have consolidated their ball skills.

Encourage children to draw freely. Engage children in structured activities, guide them in what to draw, write or copy.

Teach and model correct letter formation. Continuously check the process of children’s handwriting (pencil grip and letter formation, including directionality). Provide extra help and guidance when needed.

Plan for regular repetition so that correct letter formation becomes automatic, efficient and fluent over time.

Carefully explain some of the rules of lining up and queuing, such as not standing too close or touching others. Give children simple verbal and visual reminders.

Celebrate, praise and reward children as they develop patience, turn-taking and self-control when they need to line up and wait.

Teach and model for children how to eat with good manners in a group, taking turns and being considerate to others.

Literacy

It is crucial for children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading consists of 2 dimensions: language comprehension and word reading.

Language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together.

Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words.

Writing involves transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech, before writing).

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• enjoy songs and rhymes, tuning in and paying attention
• join in with songs and rhymes, copying sounds, rhythms, tunes and tempo
• say some of the words in songs and rhymes
• copy finger movements and other gestures
• sing songs and say rhymes independently, for example, singing whilst playing

Examples of how to support this

Song and rhyme times can happen spontaneously throughout the day, indoors and outside, with individual children, in pairs or in small groups.

You can make song and rhyme times engaging for young children by using a wide range of props or simple instruments.

Children can choose the songs and rhymes they would like to join in with, using picture cards or by speaking.

You could learn songs and rhymes from parents. You could also teach parents the songs and rhymes you use in the setting, to support learning at home.

Choose songs and rhymes which reflect the range of cultures and languages of children in the twenty-first century. Avoid songs which include gender, cultural or racial stereotypes.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• enjoy sharing books with an adult
• pay attention and respond to the pictures or the words
• have favourite books and seek them out, to share with an adult, with another child, or to look at alone
• repeat words and phrases from familiar stories
• ask questions about the book, make comments and share their own ideas
• develop play around favourite stories using props

Examples of how to support this

Provide enticing areas for sharing books, stocked with a wide range of high-quality books, matching the many different interests of children in the setting.

Provide a comfortable place for sharing books, like a sofa. In warm weather, share books outside on a picnic rug or in small tents. Themed book areas can build on children’s interests. Suggestions: relevant books close to small world play about dinosaurs, or cookbooks in the home corner.

Help children to explore favourite books through linked activities. Suggestions include:

• visiting the park or the countryside to splash through puddles and squelch through mud for ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’
• going out to buy chillies for ‘Lima’s Red Hot Chilli’
• small world play linked to favourite books

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• notice some print, such as the first letter of their name, a bus or door number, or a familiar logo
• enjoy drawing freely
• add some marks to their drawings, which they give meaning to, for example: “That says mummy.”
• make marks on their picture to stand for their name

Examples of how to support this

Point out print in the environment and talk about what it means. Suggestions: on a local walk, point out road signs, shop names and door numbers.

Provide a wide range of stimulating equipment to encourage children’s mark-making. Suggestions include:

• large-scale sensory play, such as making marks with fingers in wet sand or in a tray of flour
• using sticks and leaves to make marks during Forest school sessions
• large brushes with paint or water
• dragging streamers through puddles

Once large-muscle coordination is developing well, children can develop small-muscle coordination.

Playground chalk, smaller brushes, pencils and felt pens will support this.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to understand the 5 key concepts about print:

• print has meaning
• print can have different purposes
• we read English text from left to right and from top to bottom
• the names of the different parts of a book
• page sequencing

Examples of how to support this

Draw children’s attention to a wide range of examples of print with different functions. These could be a sign to indicate a bus stop or to show danger, a menu for choosing what you want to eat, or a logo that stands for a particular shop.

When reading to children, sensitively draw their attention to the parts of the books, for example, the cover, the author, the page number. Show children how to handle books and to turn the pages one at a time. Show children where the text is, and how English print is read left to right and top to bottom. Show children how sentences start with capital letters and end with full stops. Explain the idea of a ‘word’ to children, pointing out how some words are longer than others and how there is always a space before and after a word.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• develop their phonological awareness, so that they can:
  • spot and suggest rhymes
  • count or clap syllables in a word
  • recognise words with the same initial sound, such as money and mother
• engage in extended conversations about stories, learning new vocabulary

Examples of how to support this

Help children tune into the different sounds in English by making changes to rhymes and songs, like changing a word so that there is still a rhyme, for example: “Twinkle, twinkle yellow car”

Making rhymes personal to children: “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and fiddle, the cow jumped over Haroon.”

Deliberately miss out a word in a rhyme, so the children have to fill it in: “Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread —.”

Use magnet letters to spell a word ending like ‘at’. Encourage children to put other letters in front to create rhyming words like ‘hat’ and ‘cat’.

Choose books which reflect diversity.

Regular sharing of books and discussion of children’s ideas and responses (dialogic reading) helps children to develop their early enjoyment and understanding of books. Simple picture books, including those with no text, can be powerful ways of learning new vocabulary (for example, naming what’s in the picture). More complex stories will help children to learn a wider range of vocabulary. This type of vocabulary is not in everyday use but occurs frequently in books and other contexts. Examples include: ‘caterpillar’, ‘enormous’, ‘forest’, ‘roar’ and ‘invitation’.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• use some of their print and letter knowledge in their early writing, for example, writing a pretend shopping list that starts at the top of the page, writing ‘m’ for mummy
• write some or all of their name
• write some letters accurately

Examples of how to support this

Motivate children to write by providing opportunities in a wide range of ways. Suggestions include:

• clipboards outdoors
• chalks for paving stones
• boards and notepads in the home corner

Children enjoy having a range of pencils, crayons, chalks and pens to choose from. Apps on tablets enable children to mix marks, photos and video to express meanings and tell their own stories. Children are also motivated by simple home-made books, different coloured paper and paper decorated with fancy frames.

Help children to learn to form their letters accurately. First, they need a wide-ranging programme of physical skills development, inside and outdoors. Include large-muscle co-ordination - whole body, leg, arm and foot. This can be through climbing, swinging, messy play and parachute games. Plan for small muscle co-ordination: hands and fingers. This can be through using scissors, learning to sew, eating with cutlery, using small brushes for painting and pencils for drawing. Children also need to know the language of direction (‘up’, ‘down’, ‘round’, ‘back’,).

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• read individual letters by saying the sounds for them
• blend sounds into words, so that they can read short words made up of known letter– sound correspondences
• read some letter groups that each represent one sound and say sounds for them

Examples of how to support this

Help children to read the sounds speedily. This will make sound-blending easier.

Ask children to work out the word you say in sounds: for example, h-a-t > hat; sh-o-p > shop.

Show how to say sounds for the letters from left to right and blend them, for example, big, stamp.

Help children to become familiar with letter groups, such as ‘th’, ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘ee’ ‘or’ ‘igh’.

Provide opportunities for children to read words containing familiar letter groups: ‘that’, ‘shop’, ‘chin’, ‘feet’, ‘storm’, ‘night’.

Listen to children read some longer words made up of letter-sound correspondences they know: ‘rabbit’, ‘himself’, ‘jumping’.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• read a few common exception words matched to the school’s phonic programme
• read simple phrases and sentences made up of words with known letter–sound correspondences and, where necessary, a few exception words
• re-read these books to build up their confidence in word reading, their fluency and their understanding and enjoyment

Examples of how to support this

Note correspondences between letters and sounds that are unusual or that they have not yet been taught, such as ‘do’, ‘said’, ‘were’.

Listen to children read aloud, ensuring books are consistent with their developing phonic knowledge.

Do not include words that include letter-sound correspondences that children cannot yet read, or exception words that have not been taught.

Children should not be required to use other strategies to work out words.

Make the books available for children to share at school and at home. Avoid asking children to read books at home they cannot yet read.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• form lower-case and capital letters correctly
• spell words by identifying the sounds and then writing the sound with letters
• write short sentences with words with known sound-letter correspondences using a capital letter and full stop
• re-read what they have written to check that it makes sense

Examples of how to support this

Teach formation as they learn the sounds for each letter using a memorable phrase, encouraging an effective pen grip. When forming letters, the starting point and direction are more important at this stage than the size or position of the letter on a line.

Show children how to touch each finger as they say each sound. For exception words such as ‘the’ and ‘said’, help children identify the sound that is tricky to spell.

Support children to form the complete sentence orally before writing.

Help children memorise the sentence before writing by repeatedly saying it aloud.

Only ask children to write sentences when they have sufficient knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. Dictate sentences to ensure they contain only the taught sound-letter correspondences.

Model how you read and re-read your own writing to check it makes sense.

Mathematics

Developing a strong grounding in number is essential so that all children develop the necessary building blocks to excel mathematically. Children should be able to count confidently, develop a deep understanding of the numbers to 10, the relationships between them and the patterns within those numbers.

By providing frequent and varied opportunities to build and apply this understanding – such as using manipulatives, including small pebbles and tens frames for organising counting – children will develop a secure base of knowledge and vocabulary from which mastery of mathematics is built. In addition, it is important that the curriculum includes rich opportunities for children to develop their spatial reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics including shape, space and measures.

It is important that children develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics, look for patterns and relationships, spot connections, ‘have a go’, talk to adults and peers about what they notice and not be afraid to make mistakes.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• combine objects like stacking blocks and cups - put objects inside others and take them out again
• take part in finger rhymes with numbers
• react to changes of the amount in a group of up to 3 items

Examples of how to support this

Encourage babies and young toddlers to play freely with a wide range of objects - toddlers engage spontaneously in mathematics during nearly half of every minute of free play. Suggestions include when appropriate, sensitively join in and comment on:

• interestingly shaped objects like vegetables, wooden pegs, spoons, pans, corks, cones, balls
• pots and pans, boxes and objects to put in them, shape sorters
• stacking cups: hiding one, building them into a tower, nesting them and lining them up

Use available opportunities, including feeding and changing times for finger-play, outdoors and inside, such as ‘Round and round the garden’.

Sing finger rhymes which involve hiding and returning, like ‘Two little dicky birds’.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• compare amounts, saying ‘lots’, ‘more’ or ‘same’
• develop counting-like behaviour, such as making sounds, pointing or saying some numbers in sequence
• count in everyday contexts, sometimes skipping numbers – ‘1-2-3-5’

Examples of how to support this

Draw attention to changes in amounts, for example, by adding more bricks to a tower, or eating things up.

Offer repeated experiences with the counting sequence in meaningful and varied contexts, outside and indoors. Suggestions include counting:

• fingers and toes
• stairs
• toys
• food items
• sounds
• actions

Help children to match their counting words with objects, for example, move a piece of apple to one side once they have counted it. If children are saying one number word for each object, it is not always necessary to correct them if they skip a number. Learning to count accurately takes a long time and repeated experience. Confidence is important.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• climb and squeeze themselves into different types of spaces
• build with a range of resources
• complete inset puzzles
• compare sizes, weights etc. using gesture and language - ‘bigger, little, smaller’, ‘high or low’, ‘tall’, ‘heavy’
• notice patterns and arrange things in a pattern

Examples of how to support this

Describe children’s climbing, tunnelling and hiding using spatial words like ‘on top of’, ‘up’, ‘down’ and ‘through’.

Provide blocks and boxes to play freely with and build with, indoors and outside.

Provide inset puzzles and jigsaws at different levels of difficulty.

Use the language of size and weight in everyday contexts.

Provide objects with marked differences in size to play freely with. Suggestions include:

• dolls’ and adult chairs
• tiny and big bears
• shoes
• cups and bowls
• blocks and containers

Provide patterned material – gingham, polka dots, stripes, and small objects to arrange in patterns. Use words like ‘repeated’ and ‘the same’ over and over.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• develop fast recognition of up to 3 objects, without having to count them individually (‘subitising’)
• recite numbers past 5
• say one number for each item in order: 1,2,3,4,5
• know that the last number reached when counting a small set of objects tells you how many there are in total (‘cardinal principle’)
• show ‘finger numbers’ up to 5
• link numerals and amounts: for example, showing the right number of objects to match the numeral, up to 5

Examples of how to support this

Point to small groups of 2 or 3 objects: “Look, there are 2!” Occasionally ask children how many there are in a small set of 2 or 3.

Regularly say the counting sequence, in a variety of playful contexts, inside and outdoors, forwards and backwards, sometimes going to high numbers. For example, hide and seek or rocket-launch countdowns.

Count things and then repeat the last number. For example, “1, 2, 3 – 3 cars”. Point out the number of things whenever possible, so, rather than just ‘chairs’, ‘apples’ or ‘children’, say ‘2 chairs’, ‘three apples’, ‘4 children’.

Ask children to get you several things and emphasise the total number in your conversation with the child.

Use small numbers to manage the learning environment, for example, have a pot labelled ‘5 pencils’ or a crate for ‘3 trucks’. Draw children’s attention to these throughout the session and especially at tidy-up time: “How many pencils should be in this pot?” or “How many have we got?”.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• experiment with their own symbols and marks as well as numerals
• solve real-world mathematical problems with numbers up to 5
• compare quantities using language ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’
• talk about and explore 2D and 3D shapes (for example, circles, rectangles, triangles and cuboids) using informal and mathematical language such as:
  • sides
  • corners
  • straight
  • flat
  • round

Examples of how to support this

Encourage children in their own ways of recording, for example, how many balls they managed to throw through the hoop. Provide numerals nearby for references such as wooden numerals in a basket or a number track on the fence.

Discuss mathematical ideas throughout the day, inside and outdoors. Suggestions include:

• “I think Jasmin has got more crackers…”
• supporting children to solve problems using fingers, objects and marks: “There are 4 of you, but there aren’t enough chairs….”
• draw children’s attention to differences and changes in amounts, such as those in stories like ‘The Enormous Turnip’

Encourage children to play freely with blocks, shapes, shape puzzles and shape-sorters. Sensitively support and discuss questions like: “What is the same and what is different?”

Encourage children to talk informally about shape properties using words like ‘sharp corner’, ‘pointy’ or ‘curvy’. Talk about shapes as you play with them: “We need a piece with a straight edge.”

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• understand position through words alone, for example, “The bag is under the table,” with no pointing
• describe a familiar route
• discuss routes and locations, using words like ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’
• make comparisons between objects relating to size, length, weight and capacity
• select shapes appropriately such as flat surfaces for building or a triangular prism for a roof
• combine shapes to make new ones, for example, an arch or a bigger triangle

Examples of how to support this

Discuss position in real contexts. Suggestions: how to shift the leaves off a path or sweep water away down the drain.

Use spatial words in play, including ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘besides’ and ‘between’. For example, “Let’s put the troll under the bridge and the billy goat beside the stream.”

Take children out to shops or the park and recall the route and the order of things seen on the way.

Set up obstacle courses, interesting pathways and hiding places for children to play with freely. When appropriate, ask children to describe their route and give directions to each other.

Provide complex train tracks, with loops and bridges, or water-flowing challenges with guttering that direct the flow to a water tray, for children to play freely with.

Read stories about journeys, such as ‘Rosie’s Walk’.

Provide experiences of size changes. Suggestions: “Can you make a puddle larger?”, “When you squeeze a sponge, does it stay small?”, “What happens when you stretch the dough, or elastic?”

Talk with children about their everyday ways of comparing size, length, weight and capacity. Model more specific techniques, such as lining up ends of lengths and straightening ribbons, discussing accuracy: “Is it exactly…?”

Provide a variety of construction materials like blocks and interlocking bricks. Provide den-making materials. Allow children to play freely with these materials, outdoors and inside. When appropriate, talk about the shapes and how their properties suit the purpose.

Provide shapes that combine to make other shapes, such as pattern blocks and interlocking shapes, for children to play freely with. When appropriate, discuss the different designs that children make. Occasionally suggest challenges, so that children build increasingly more complex constructions.

Use tidy-up time to match blocks to silhouettes or fit things in containers, describing and naming shapes. For example, “Where does this triangular one, cylinder or cuboid go?”

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• talk about and identify the patterns around them, for example, stripes on clothes or designs on rugs and wallpaper
• use informal language like ‘pointy’, ‘spotty’ or ‘blobs’
• extend and create ABAB patterns – stick, leaf, stick, leaf
• notice and correct an error in a repeating pattern
• begin to describe a sequence of events, real or fictional, using words such as ‘first’, ‘then…’

Examples of how to support this

Provide patterns from different cultures, such as fabrics.

Provide a range of natural and everyday objects and materials, as well as blocks and shapes, for children to play with freely and to make patterns with. When appropriate, encourage children to continue patterns and spot mistakes.

Engage children in following and inventing movement and music patterns, such as clap, clap, stamp.

Talk about patterns of events, in cooking, gardening, sewing or getting dressed. Suggestions include:

• ‘first’, ‘then’, ‘after’, ‘before’
• “Every day we…”
• “Every evening we…”

Talk about the sequence of events in stories. Use vocabulary like ‘morning’, ‘afternoon’, ‘evening’ and ‘night-time’, ‘earlier’, ‘later’, ‘too late’, ‘too soon’, ‘in a minute’.

Count down to forthcoming events on the calendar in terms of the number of days or sleeps. Refer to the days of the week, and the day before or day after, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• count objects, actions and sounds
• subitise
• link the number symbol (numeral) with its cardinal number value
• count beyond 10

Examples of how to support this

Develop the key skills of counting objects including saying the numbers in order and matching one number name to each item.

Say how many there are after counting – for example, “…6, 7, 8. There are 8 balls” – to help children appreciate that the last number of the count indicates the total number of the group. This is the cardinal counting principle.

Say how many there might be before you count to give a purpose to counting: “I think there are about 8. Shall we count to see?”

Count out a smaller number from a larger group: “Give me seven…” Knowing when to stop shows that children understand the cardinal principle.

Build counting into everyday routines such as register time, tidying up, lining up or counting out pieces of fruit at snack time.

Sing counting songs and number rhymes and read stories that involve counting.

Play games which involve counting.

Identify children who have had less prior experience of counting and provide additional opportunities for counting practice.

Show small quantities in familiar patterns (for example, dice) and random arrangements.

Play games which involve quickly revealing and hiding numbers of objects.

Put objects into 5 frames and then 10 frames to begin to familiarise children with the tens structure of the number system.

Prompt children to subitise first when enumerating groups of up to 4 or 5 objects: “I don’t think we need to count those. They are in a square shape so there must be 4.” Count to check.

Encourage children to show a number of fingers ‘all at once’, without counting.

Display numerals in order alongside dot quantities or tens frame arrangements.

Play card games such as snap or matching pairs with cards where some have numerals, and some have dot arrangements. Discuss the different ways children might record quantities (for example, scores in games), such as tallies, dots and using numeral cards.

Count verbally beyond 20, pausing at each multiple of 10 to draw out the structure, for instance when playing hide and seek, or to time children getting ready.

Provide images such as number tracks, calendars and hundred squares indoors and out, including painted on the ground, so children become familiar with 2-digit numbers and can start to spot patterns within them.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• compare numbers
• understand the ‘one more than or one less than’ relationship between consecutive numbers
• explore the composition of numbers to 10
• automatically recall number bonds for numbers 0 to 5 and some to 10
• select, rotate and manipulate shapes to develop spatial reasoning skills

Examples of how to support this

Provide collections to compare, starting with a very different number of things. Include more small things and fewer large things, spread them out and bunch them up, to draw attention to the number not the size of things or the space they take up. Include groups where the number of items is the same. Use vocabulary such as ‘more than’, ‘less than’, ‘fewer’, ‘the same as’, ‘equal to’. Encourage children to use these words as well.

Distribute items evenly, for example: “Put 3 in each bag,” or give the same number of pieces of fruit to each child. Make deliberate mistakes to provoke discussion.

Tell a story about a character distributing snacks unfairly and invite children to make sure everyone has the same.

Make predictions about what the outcome will be in stories, rhymes and songs if one is added, or if one is taken away.

Provide ‘staircase’ patterns which show that the next counting number includes the previous number plus one.

Focus on the composition of 2, 3, 4 and 5 before moving onto larger numbers.

Provide a range of visual models of numbers: for example, 6 as double 3 on dice, or the fingers on one hand and one more, or as 4 and 2 with 10 frame images.

Model conceptual subitising: “Well, there are 3 here and 3 here, so there must be 6.”

Emphasise the parts within the whole: “There were 8 eggs in the incubator. Two have hatched and 6 have not yet hatched.”

Plan games which involve partitioning and recombining sets. For example, throw 5 beanbags, aiming for a hoop. How many go in and how many don’t?

Have a sustained focus on each number to and within 5. Make visual and practical displays in the classroom showing the different ways of making numbers to 5 so that children can refer to these.

Help children to learn number bonds through lots of hands-on experiences of partitioning and combining numbers in different contexts, and seeing subitising patterns.

Play hiding games with a number of objects in a box, under a cloth, in a tent, in a cave, such as “6 went in the tent and 3 came out. I wonder how many are still in there?”

Intentionally give children the wrong number of things. For example, ask each child to plant 4 seeds then give them 1, 2 or 3. “I’ve only got 1 seed, I need 3 more.”

Spot and use opportunities for children to apply number bonds: “There are 5 of us but only 2 clipboards. How many more do we need?”

Place objects into a 5 frame and talk about how many spaces are filled and unfilled.

Provide high-quality pattern and building sets, including pattern blocks, tangrams, building blocks and magnetic construction tiles, as well as found materials. Challenge children to copy increasingly complex 2D pictures and patterns with these 3D resources, guided by knowledge of learning trajectories: “I bet you can’t add an arch to that,” or “Maybe tomorrow someone will build a staircase.”

Teach children to solve a range of jigsaws of increasing challenges.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• compose and decompose shapes so that children recognise a shape can have other shapes within it, just as numbers can
• continue, copy and create repeating patterns
• compare length, weight and capacity

Examples of how to support this

Investigate how shapes can be combined to make new shapes, for example, 2 triangles can be put together to make a square. Encourage children to predict what shapes they will make when the paper is folded. Wonder aloud how many ways there are to make a hexagon with pattern blocks.

Find 2D shapes within 3D shapes, including through printing or shadow play.

Make patterns with varying rules (including AB, ABB and ABBC) and objects and invite children to continue the pattern. Make a deliberate mistake and discuss how to fix it.

Model comparative language using ‘than’ and encourage children to use this vocabulary. For example: “This is heavier than that.”

Ask children to make and test predictions. “What if we pour the jugful into the teapot? Which holds more?”

Understanding the world

Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community.

The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world.

As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains. Enriching and widening children’s vocabulary will support later reading comprehension.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• repeat actions that have an effect
• explore materials with different properties
• explore natural materials, indoors and outside

Examples of how to support this

Encourage babies’ explorations and movements, such as touching their fingers and toes. Show delight at their kicking and waving.

Provide open-ended play materials inside and outdoors. Suggestions include:

• treasure baskets for repeated exploration of textures, sounds, smells and tastes
• offering lots of different textures for exploration with fingers, feet and whole body such as:
  • wet and dry sand
  • water
  • paint
  • playdough

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to explore and respond to different natural phenomena in their setting and on trips.

Examples of how to support this

Encourage toddlers and young children to enjoy and explore the natural world. Suggestions include:

• standing in the rain with wellies and umbrellas
• walking through tall grass
• splashing in puddles
• seeing the spring daffodils and cherry blossom
• looking for worms and minibeasts
• visiting the beach and exploring the sand, pebbles and paddling in the sea

Encourage children’s exploration, curiosity, appreciation and respect for living things. Suggestions include:

• sharing the fascination of a child who finds woodlice teeming under an old log
• modelling the careful handling of a worm and helping children return it to the dug-up soil
• carefully planting, watering and looking after plants they have grown from seeds

Encourage children to bring natural materials into the setting, such as leaves and conkers picked up from the pavement or park during autumn.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• make connections between the features of their family and other families
• notice differences between people

Examples of how to support this

Be open to children talking about differences and what they notice. For example, when children ask questions like: “Why do you wear a scarf around your head?” or “How come your hair feels different to mine?” Point out the similarities between different families, as well as discussing differences.

Model positive attitudes about the differences between people including differences in race and religion. Support children’s acceptance of difference. Have resources which include:

• positive images of people who are disabled
• books and play materials that reflect the diversity of life in modern Britain including racial and religious diversity
• materials which confront gender stereotypes

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• use all their senses in hands-on exploration of natural materials
• explore collections of materials with similar or different properties
• talk about what they see, using a wide vocabulary

Examples of how to support this

Provide interesting natural environments for children to explore freely outdoors.

Make collections of natural materials to investigate and talk about. Suggestions include:

• contrasting pieces of bark
• different types of leaves and seeds
• different types of rocks
• different shells and pebbles from the beach

Provide equipment to support these investigations such as magnifying glasses or a tablet with a magnifying app. Encourage children to talk about what they see.

Model observational and investigational skills. Ask out loud: “I wonder if…?”

Plan and introduce new vocabulary, encouraging children to use it to discuss their findings and ideas.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• begin to make sense of their own life story and family’s history
• show interest in different occupations

Examples of how to support this

Spend time with children talking about photos and memories. Encourage children to retell what their parents told them about their life story and family.

Invite different people to visit from a range of occupations, such as a plumber, a farmer, a vet, a member of the emergency services or an author.

Plan and introduce new vocabulary related to the occupation and encourage children to use it in their speech and play. Consider opportunities to challenge gender and other stereotypes.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• explore how things work
• plant seeds and care for growing plants
• understand the key features of the life cycle of a plant and an animal
• begin to understand the need to respect and care for the natural environment and all living things

Examples of how to support this

Provide mechanical equipment for children to play with and investigate. Suggestions: wind-up toys, pulleys, sets of cogs with pegs and boards.

Show and explain the concepts of growth, change and decay with natural materials. Suggestions include:

• planting seeds and bulbs so children observe growth and decay over time
• observing an apple core going brown and mouldy over time
• helping children to care for animals and take part in first-hand scientific explorations of animal life cycles, such as caterpillars or chick eggs

Plan and introduce new vocabulary related to the exploration. Encourage children to use it in their discussions, as they care for living things.

Encourage children to refer to books, wall displays and online resources. This will support their investigations and extend their knowledge and ways of thinking.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• explore and talk about different forces they can feel
• talk about the differences between materials and changes they notice

Examples of how to support this

Draw children’s attention to forces. Suggestions include:

• how the water pushes up when they try to push a plastic boat under it
• how they can stretch elastic, snap a twig, but cannot bend a metal rod
• magnetic attraction and repulsion

Plan and introduce new vocabulary related to the exploration and encourage children to use it.

Provide children with opportunities to change materials from one state to another. Suggestions include:

• cooking – combining different ingredients, and then cooling or heating (cooking) them
• melting – leave ice cubes out in the sun, see what happens when you shake salt onto them (children should not touch to avoid the danger of frostbite)

Explore how different materials sink and float.

Explore how you can shine light through some materials, but not others. Investigate shadows. Plan and introduce new vocabulary related to the exploration and encourage children to use it.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• continue developing positive attitudes about the differences between people
• know that there are different countries in the world and talk about the differences they have experienced or seen in photos

Examples of how to support this

Ensure that resources reflect the diversity of life in modern Britain.

Encourage children to talk about the differences they notice between people, whilst also drawing their attention to similarities between different families and communities. Answer their questions and encourage discussion. Talk positively about different appearances, skin colours and hair types.

Celebrate and value cultural, religious and community events and experiences.

Help children to learn each other’s names, modelling correct pronunciation.

Practitioners can create books and displays about children’s families around the world, or holidays they have been on. Encourage children to talk about each other’s families and ask questions.

Use a diverse range of props, puppets, dolls and books to encourage children to notice and talk about similarities and differences.

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to:

• talk about members of their immediate family and community
• name and describe people who are familiar to them
• comment on images of familiar situations in the past
• compare and contrast characters from stories, including figures from the past

Examples of how to support this

During dedicated talk time, listen to what children say about their family.

Share information about your own family, giving children time to ask questions or make comments. Encourage children to share pictures of their family and listen to what they say about the pictures.

Using examples from real life and from books, show children how there are many different families.

Talk about people that the children may have come across within their community, such as:

• delivery and shop staff
• hairdressers
• the police
• the fire service
• nurses
• doctors
• teachers

Listen to what children say about their own experiences with people who are familiar to them.

Present children with pictures, stories, artefacts and accounts from the past, explaining similarities and differences.

Offer hands-on experiences that deepen children’s understanding, such as visiting a local area that has historical importance. Include a focus on the lives of both women and men.

Show images of familiar situations in the past, such as homes, schools, and transport.

Look for opportunities to observe children talking about experiences that are familiar to them and how these may have differed in the past.

Offer opportunities for children to begin to organise events using basic chronology, recognising that things happened before they were born.

Frequently share texts, images, and tell oral stories that help children begin to develop an understanding of the past and present.

Feature fictional and non-fictional characters from a range of cultures and times in storytelling. Listen to what children say about them.

Draw out common themes from stories, such as bravery, difficult choices and kindness, and talk about children’s experiences with these themes.

In addition to storytelling, introduce characters, including those from the past using songs, poems, puppets, role play and other storytelling methods.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• draw information from a simple map
• understand that some places are special to members of their community
• recognise that people have different beliefs and celebrate special times in different ways
• recognise some similarities and differences between life in this country and life in other countries

Examples of how to support this

Draw children’s attention to the immediate environment, introducing and modelling new vocabulary where appropriate.

Familiarise children with the name of the road, and or village, town or city the school is located in. Look at aerial views of the school setting, encouraging children to comment on what they notice, recognising buildings, open space, roads and other simple features.

Offer opportunities for children to choose to draw simple maps of their immediate environment, or maps from imaginary story settings they are familiar with.

Name and explain the purpose of places of worship and places of local importance to the community to children, drawing on their own experiences where possible.

Take children to places of worship and places of local importance to the community.

Invite visitors from different religious and cultural communities into the classroom to share their experiences with children.

Weave opportunities for children to engage with religious and cultural communities and their practices throughout the curriculum at appropriate times of the year.

Help children to begin to build a rich bank of vocabulary with which to describe their own lives and the lives of others.

Teach children about places in the world that contrast with locations they know well. Use relevant, specific vocabulary to describe contrasting locations.

Use images, video clips, shared texts and other resources to bring the wider world into the classroom. Listen to what children say about what they see.

Avoid stereotyping and explain how children’s lives in other countries may be similar or different in terms of how they travel to school, what they eat, where they live, and so on.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• explore the natural world around them
• describe what they see, hear and feel whilst outside
• recognise some environments that are different from the one in which they live
• understand the effect of changing seasons on the natural world around them

Examples of how to support this

Provide children with have frequent opportunities for outdoor play and exploration. Encourage interactions with the outdoors to foster curiosity and give children the freedom to touch, smell and hear the natural world around them during hands-on experiences.

Create opportunities to discuss how we care for the natural world around us.

Offer opportunities to sing songs and join in with rhymes and poems about the natural world.

After close observation, draw pictures of the natural world, including animals and plants.

Observe and interact with natural processes, such as ice melting, a sound causing a vibration, light travelling through transparent material, an object casting a shadow, a magnet attracting an object and a boat floating on water.

Encourage focused observation of the natural world. Listen to children describing and commenting on things they have seen whilst outside, including plants and animals.

Encourage positive interaction with the outside world, offering children a chance to take supported risks, appropriate to themselves and the environment within which they are in.

Name and describe some plants and animals children are likely to see, encouraging children to recognise familiar plants and animals whilst outside.

Teach children about a range of contrasting environments within both their local and national region.

Model the vocabulary needed to name specific features of the world, both natural and made by people.

Share non-fiction texts that offer an insight into contrasting environments.

Listen to how children communicate their understanding of their own environment and contrasting environments through conversation and in play.

Guide children’s understanding by draw children’s attention to the weather and seasonal features.

Provide opportunities for children to note and record the weather. Select texts to share with the children about the changing seasons.

Throughout the year, take children outside to observe the natural world and encourage children to observe how animals behave differently as the seasons change.

Look for children incorporating their understanding of the seasons and weather in their play.

Expressive arts and design

The development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity. It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials.

The quality and variety of what children see, hear and participate in is crucial for developing their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary and ability to communicate through the arts.

The frequency, repetition and depth of their experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond to and observe.

Birth to 3

Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• show attention to sounds and music
• respond emotionally and physically to music when it changes
• move and dance to music
• anticipate phrases and actions in rhymes and songs, like ‘Peepo’
• explore their voices and enjoy making sounds
• join in with songs and rhymes, making some sounds
• make rhythmical and repetitive sounds
• explore a range of soundmakers and instruments and play them in different ways
• enjoy and take part in action songs, such as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’.

Examples of how to support this

Babies are born ready to enjoy and make music from birth.

Stimulate their enjoyment of music through singing and playing musical and singing games which are attuned to the baby.

Provide babies, toddlers and young children with a range of different types of singing, sounds and music from diverse cultures. Music and singing can be live as well as pre-recorded.

Play and perform music with different:

• dynamics (loud and quiet)
• tempo (fast and slow)
• pitch (high and low)
• rhythms (pattern of sound)

Introduce children to songs, including songs to go with routines. Suggestion: when washing hands, sing “This is the ways we wash our hands…”.

Provide children with instruments and with ‘found objects’, for example, tapping a bottle onto the table or running a twig along a fence. Encourage children to experiment with different ways of playing instruments.

Introduce children to a broad selection of action songs from different cultures and languages. Sing songs regularly so that children learn the words, melody and actions off by heart.

Encourage children to accompany action songs. They can do this with their own movements or by playing instruments.

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• notice patterns with strong contrasts and be attracted by patterns resembling the human face
• start to make marks intentionally
• explore paint, using fingers and other parts of their bodies as well as brushes and other tools
• express ideas and feelings through making marks, and sometimes give a meaning to the marks they make

Examples of how to support this

Ensure that the physical environment includes objects and materials with different patterns, colours, tones and textures for babies and young children to explore.

Stimulate babies’ and toddlers’ early interest in making marks. Offer a wide range of different materials and encourage children to make marks in different ways.

Suggestions include:

• inviting them to submerge their fingers in cornflour
• playing with a stick in the mud
• placing hands and feet in paint
• using tablets or computers
• introducing colour names

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Babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• start to develop pretend play, pretending that one object represents another, for example, a child holds a wooden block to her ear and pretends it’s a phone
• explore different materials, using all their senses to investigate them
• manipulate and play with different materials
• use their imagination as they consider what they can do with different materials
• make simple models which express their ideas

Examples of how to support this

Children generally start to understand the difference between pretend and real from around the age of 2.

Help children to develop their pretend play by modelling, sensitively joining in and helping them to elaborate it. For example, help to develop a child’s home corner play of feeding a ‘baby’, by suggesting a nappy-change and then a song as you settle the ‘baby’ to sleep.

Stimulate young children’s interest in modelling. Suggestions include providing:

• a wide range of found materials (‘junk’) as well as blocks, clay, softwood, card, offcuts of fabrics and materials with different textures
• appropriate tools and joining methods for the materials offered

Encourage young children to explore materials and resources, finding out what they are, what they can do and decide how they want to use them.

3 and 4-year-olds

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• take part in simple pretend play, using an object to represent something else even though they are not similar
• begin to develop complex stories using small world equipment like animal sets, dolls and dolls houses
• make imaginative and complex ‘small worlds’ with blocks and construction kits, such as a city with different buildings and a park

Examples of how to support this

Children generally start to develop pretend play with ‘rules’ when they are 3 or 4 years old. Suggestion: offer pinecones in the home corner for children to pour into pans and stir like pasta.

Some rules are self-created (the pole is now a horse, or the pinecones are now pasta in the pot). Other rules are group-created (to play in the home corner, you must accept the rule that one of your friends is pretending to be a baby).

Provide lots of flexible and open-ended resources for children’s imaginative play.

Help children to negotiate roles in play and sort out conflicts.

Notice children who are not taking part in pretend play, and help them to join in.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• explore different materials freely, to develop their ideas about how to use them and what to make
• develop their own ideas and then decide which materials to use to express them
• join different materials and explore different textures
• create closed shapes with continuous lines and begin to use these shapes to represent objects
• draw with increasing complexity and detail, such as representing a face with a circle and including details
• use drawing to represent ideas like movement or loud noises
• show different emotions in their drawings and paintings, like happiness, sadness, fear
• explore colour and colour mixing
• show different emotions in their drawings – happiness, sadness, fear

Examples of how to support this

Offer opportunities to explore scale. Suggestions include:

• long strips of wallpaper
• child size boxes
• different surfaces to work on, for example, paving, floor, tabletop or easel

Listen and understand what children want to create before offering suggestions.

Invite artists, musicians and craftspeople into the setting, to widen the range of ideas which children can draw on.

Suggestions include:

• glue and masking tape for sticking pieces of scrap materials onto old cardboard boxes
• hammers and nails
• glue guns
• paperclips and fasteners

Help children to develop their drawing and modelmaking. Encourage them to develop their own creative ideas. Spend sustained time alongside them. Show interest in the meanings children give to their drawings and models. Talk together about these meanings.

Encourage children to draw from their imagination and observation.

Help children to add details to their drawings by selecting interesting objects to draw, and by pointing out key features to children and discussing them.

Talk to children about the differences between colours. Help them to explore and refine their colour mixing – for example: “How does blue become green?”

Introduce children to the work of artists from across times and cultures. Help them to notice where features of artists’ work overlap with the children’s, for example in details, colour, movement or line.

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3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• listen with increased attention to sounds
• respond to what they have heard, expressing their thoughts and feelings
• remember and sing entire songs
• sing the pitch of a tone sung by another person (‘pitch match’)
• sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs
• create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know
• play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas

Examples of how to support this

Help children to develop their listening skills through a range of active listening activities. Notice ‘how’ children listen well, for example, listening whilst painting or drawing, or whilst moving.

Play, share and perform a wide variety of music and songs from different cultures and historical periods.

Play sound-matching games.

When teaching songs to children be aware of your own pitch (high and low). Children’s voices are higher than adult voices. When supporting children to develop their singing voice use a limited pitch range. For example, ‘Rain rain’ uses a smaller pitch (high and low) range than many traditional nursery rhymes. Children’s singing voices and their ability to control them is developing. Encourage them to use their ‘singing’ voice - when asked to sing loudly, children often shout.

Sing slowly, so that children clearly hear the words and the melody of the song.

Use songs with and without words – children may pitch-match more easily without words. Try using one-syllable sounds such as ‘ba’.

Clap or tap to the pulse of songs or music and encourage children to do this.

Offer children a wide range of different instruments, from a range of cultures. This might also include electronic keyboards and musical apps on tablets.

Encourage children to experiment with different ways of playing instruments. Listen carefully to their music making and value it. Suggestion: record children’s pieces, play the pieces back to the children and include them in your repertoire of music played in the setting.

Children in reception

Children in reception will be learning to

• explore, use and refine a variety of artistic effects to express their ideas and feelings
• return to and build on their previous learning, refining ideas and developing their ability to represent them
• create collaboratively, sharing ideas, resources and skills

Examples of how to support this

Teach children to develop their colour-mixing techniques to enable them to match the colours they see and want to represent, with step-by-step guidance when appropriate.

Provide opportunities to work together to develop and realise creative ideas.

Provide children with a range of materials for children to construct with. Encourage them to think about and discuss what they want to make. Discuss problems and how they might be solved as they arise. Reflect with children on how they have achieved their aims.

Teach children different techniques for joining materials, such as how to use adhesive tape and different sorts of glue.

Provide a range of materials and tools and teach children to use them with care and precision. Promote independence, taking care not to introduce too many new things at once.

Encourage children to notice features in the natural world. Help them to define colours, shapes, textures and smells in their own words. Discuss children’s responses to what they see.

Visit galleries and museums to generate inspiration and conversation about art and artists.

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Children in reception will be learning to:

• listen attentively, move to and talk about music, expressing their feelings and responses
• watch and talk about dance and performance art, expressing their feelings and responses
• sing in a group or on their own, increasingly matching the pitch and following the melody
• explore and engage in music making and dance, performing solo or in groups

Examples of how to support this

Give children an insight into new musical worlds. Introduce them to different kinds of music from across the globe, including traditional and folk music from Britain.

Invite musicians in to play music to children and talk about it.

Encourage children to listen attentively to music. Discuss changes and patterns as a piece of music develops.

Offer opportunities for children to go to a live performance, such as a pantomime, play, music or dance performance.

Provide related costumes and props for children to incorporate into their pretend play.

Play pitch-matching games, humming or singing short phrases for children to copy.

Use songs with and without words – children may pitch match more easily with sounds like ‘ba’.

Sing call-and-response songs, so that children can echo phrases of songs you sing. Introduce new songs gradually and repeat them regularly. Sing slowly, so that children can listen to the words and the melody of the song.

Notice and encourage children to keep a steady beat, this may be whilst singing and tapping their knees, dancing to music, or making their own music with instruments and sound makers.

Play movement and listening games that use different sounds for different movements. Suggestions include march to the sound of the drum or creep to the sound of the maraca.

Model how to tap rhythms to accompany words, such as tapping the syllables of names, objects, animals and the lyrics of a song.

Play music with a pulse for children to move in time with and encourage them to respond to changes: they could jump when the music suddenly becomes louder, for example.

Encourage children to create their own music.

Encourage children to replicate choreographed dances, such as pop songs and traditional dances from around the world. Encourage children to choreograph their own dance moves, using some of the steps and techniques they have learnt.

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Children in reception will be learning to develop storylines in their pretend play.

Examples of how to support this

Provide a wide range of props for play which encourage imagination. Suggestions include:

• different lengths and styles of fabric can become capes
• the roof of a small den
• a picnic rug or an invisibility cloak

Support children in deciding which role they might want to play and learning how to negotiate, be patient and solve conflicts.

Help children who find it difficult to join in pretend play. Stay next to them and comment on the play. Model joining in. Discuss how they might get involved.

1. Education Policy Institute: education in England annual report 2020 and early years foundation stage profile results: 2018 to 2019. ↩