Challenge in Provision

May 13, 2019

Is It Possible To Create Challenge In Your Provision?

I inherited organised, well-resourced and labelled provision.

But it wasn’t enough!

It looked great and could be tidied up easily.

Yet something wasn’t right…

The play in my sand area from my Reception children was low level play; tipping, pouring and making sand castles. Running race cars round the edge of the tray.

This provision was not making an impact on my children’s learning. I needed to look at the area through a fresh set of eyes. How could I inject challenge? What did my children need?

I began to make some changes.

We enhanced the area with loose parts and blocks so that children could build their own scenes, number pebbles, scrabble alphabet tiles, natural resources like sticks and pine cones. I added in small world resourcing; insects, desert creatures, play people, pirates and play villains and heroes. All of these encouraged imaginative story telling and language development!

We also add a sand in miniature tray to the area too. Here children could work on moving sand around with increased levels of precision which worked on their fine motor skills and understanding of volume and capacity. We resourced it with tiny scoops, miniature pots and funnels. We also added in small stones, pebbles, shells and examples of patterns.

Finally, we had challenge!