Within an early years setting, practitioners focus their planning on the individual children they care for. We plan spontaneously and in the moment. This allows for a practitioner to adapt the day to the current moods and interests of the children, for example if a child is enjoying filling and emptying pots an activity such as water play with jugs and measuring resources would be appropriate for that child. We would then allow the child to take the activity and adapt it using their own creativity. All the research behind this type of planning emphasises the fact that children live and learn in the moment and its our job to catch these glimpses of opportunities to nurture a development area or provide more opportunities for the child to extend this learning.
Living in the moment is something that comes naturally to children, but as we grow the pressures of the society we live in break us away from the here and now. We stop living in the present and feel the need to continuously focus on the next thing, tomorrow or something we could have done better yesterday.
“Don’t waste too much of today on yesterday or tomorrow”
Lets learn from our children, even if its just one simple thing a day. Lets take a moment in the day and completely focus on that. Use all our senses, smell the coffee, taste the bitterness, feel the heat on your lips, listen to the kitchen clock tick. Enjoy the moment, just for a minute. Children have the opportunities throughout their day to enjoy the experience as it is, with no expectation of what it “should of been” or how it “could be improved”. They have no preconceptions of how an experience should be, it just is, and they just are.