Are you preparing activities ahead of time? But still, you are not feeling fully prepared when it’s time to start the day with the little ones? → Do you feel like your lesson planning is just colorful patches here and there? Rather than a finished, harmonious quilt?

Kindiedays' early childhood professionals and Angela Watson combined their thoughts. How to do clever and effective planning for early childhood education?

Overcome the problems with our creative, effective, and concrete solutions!

Who uses Kindiedays?

1. How to organize and save activity ideas?

PROBLEM:

I collect so many great ideas, but then I’m not sure how to use them and when. →  I have all those colorful patches but they are different shapes and sizes and do not go together.

SOLUTION:

• Have a good organizational system (Google drive, Pinterest...)

• Keep the ideas organized by topic or unit, and then all you have to do is go through that folder before planning each unit and decide what to actually use

2. How to reduce the amount of useless activities?

PROBLEM:

I have wayyyy too many options for activities. There are so many free resources available online these days. → There are so many colors and fabrics and styles and I cannot decide what kind of quilt I would like to make!

SOLUTION:

• Get rid of the things that are lower quality (eg. learning goals are not aligned with your curriculum)
• If you’re afraid you might want to use the resources one day, put them in a folder and name it “not using”. Then they’re out of your way
• Quality, not quantity! Make it your goal to do fewer things, so you can do the things that remain even better
• Keep only the best resources. Then you don’t have to waste time going through the things that aren’t that useful with your group of children
• Create a collection of open-ended and versatile activities. These you can use flexibly with many lessons and themes

Read more about our high-quality → Kindiedays Lesson Plans

3. Planning the lessons in detail

PROBLEM:

I am stuck on this hamster wheel - I never know what we are doing the next day in the classroom. → Every day I just pick some piece of fabric from the pile and start sewing without a clear sewing pattern in my mind.

SOLUTION:

• Decide a specific theme for each day that remains the same eg.
  • Monday: science
  • Tuesday: maths
  • Wednesday: arts
  • Thursday: physical exercise
  • Friday: free play

• Make a visible timetable on the wall! Put the timetable in a place that it is visible for the parents too, then they know what their children have been up to!

• Break down what you’ll be doing each day. Here is an example for a week with a Halloween theme:
  • Monday: science → Baking pumpkin pie
  • Tuesday: maths → Spider web counting activity
  • Wednesday: arts → Paint pumpkins (orange apple prints)
  • Thursday: physical exercise → Spider web yarn maze
  • Friday: free play → Roleplay clothes available

• Plan all 5 days in advance. Most of the planning work should be done before Monday morning
• Planning with a co-worker would be amazing, so do that if possible
• Organize regular planning meetings once a week

Check out our → Kindiedays Lesson Plan template

4. How to plan the daily lesson plans?

PROBLEM:

Despite having a plan for the week, I often end up forgetting to do something each day! → Even though I have the 'big picture' sewing pattern in my head I tend to forget some pieces from the middle of the quilt..!

Are you preparing activities ahead of time, but still you have to do more planning every night and are not feeling fully prepared when it’s time to teach?

Angela Watson shared her ideas about clever and effective lesson planning and how to escape the daily lesson planning trap.

1. Organizing and saving ideas

PROBLEM:

I collect so many great ideas, but then I’m not sure how to make it all happen. I feel like the problem is that I just end up downloading random stuff and then when it’s time to plan the unit, I have too many options. I just see something online and think that’s a great activity and I buy it without thinking if I even need another resource for this particular theme. I want to use them all, but in the end I cannot and it’s too much to go through them all.

SOLUTION:

• Have a good organizational system (Pinterest, Google drive...)

• Keep the ideas organized by topic or unit, and then all you have to is go through that folder before planning each unit and decide what to actually use

2. Resources and activity ideas

PROBLEM:

I have wayyyy too many options because there are so many free resources available these days. And generally, curriculum companies provide way more activities and resources than you can ever use. Going through all of that is be too time consuming and overwhelming.

SOLUTION:

• Get rid of the things that are lower quality (eg. learning goals are not aligned with your curriculum)
• If you’re afraid you might want to use the resources one day, put them in a folder and name it “not using” and then they’re out of your way
• Make it your goal to do fewer things, so you can do the things that remain even better
• Keep only the best resources so that you don’t have to waste time going through the things that aren’t that useful with your group of children
• Create a collection of open-ended and versatile activities that you can use flexibly with many lessons and themes

Read more about our high-quality → Kindiedays Lesson Plans

3. Planning the lessons in detail

PROBLEM:

I am stuck on this hamster wheel - I never know what we are doing the next day in the classroom. There is no choice but to spend every evening planning the next day’s activities, which is exhausting for me as the teacher and it also tends to lead to lessons that aren’t necessarily that cohesive in the long run.

SOLUTION:

• Break down what you’ll be doing each day
• Plan all five days in advance
• Plan the details of the lessons on a weekly basis
• The most of the planning work should be done before Monday morning so that you’re not trying to figure out in the evenings what you’re going to do with the children the next day
• Planning with a co-worker would be amazing, so do that if possible
• Organize regular planning meetings once a week

Check out our → Kindiedays Lesson Plan template

4. Worksheets and printables

PROBLEM:

I felt like there were so many printables and worksheets that I wanted to use, but it was overwhelming. I wasn’t really thinking about which ones I was actually going to use. I was just sort of printing them all out and deciding in the beginning of the lesson. So it was just like this stack of papers that maybe I would use and maybe I wouldn’t.

An effective lesson gives children

• Something to think 
• Possibilities to interact
• Possibilities to ask questions
• Information based on their background knowledge
• Possibilities to build new skills

"A lot of approaches to lesson planning are content-driven, giving teachers some boxes to fill in," says Peter Brunn, director of professional development at the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, Calif., and author of The Lesson Planning Handbook. "While these approaches include what we want to teach, they don't often contain HOW we're going to teach it." It's the "how," says Brunn, that makes all the difference in whether children actually learn.

Check out the Kindiedays Lesson Plans

Effective lesson planning requires the teacher to determine three essential components:

1. Objective
2. Body
3. Reflection

OBJECTIVE

To start, come up with an active objective. Try to create it so that the lesson seems engaging.

"Today we'll explore the different styles of jumping" gives a signal for the children that they get to test it out together with you.

Brunn encourages teachers to create lessons that allow children to investigate various possibilities—even wrong answers—so that they truly understand why something is right. "You can't wing that kind of lesson," he says. "You have to set it up intentionally."

Get 6 free Kindiedays Lesson Plans

BODY

Once you have an active objective, it's time to plan the body of the lesson. Brunn suggests writing down open-ended questions and deciding how you will ask them and what you will do if your children don't or can't answer these questions. How will you probe their thinking? You need to continually facilitate the lesson to keep children focused.

During a jumping themed lesson, you could ask children questions as:

• Can you teach me to jump?
• Which animals or insects know how to jump?
• Are frog jumps and bunny jumps different? How?
• Can you jump down from objects?
• Can you jump up on objects?
• Can you jump over objects?
• What muscles you need for jumping?
• How many times you can jump? 5? 10? 20?
• How far are you able to jump?
• What is the smallest jump you can make?

Have some materials ready, for example a pillow that children can jump onto. Or a stable chair that children can jump down from. A measure is interesting too, in order to measure how far the children can jump.

And check before jumping that the gym floor is not slippery or ask the children take socks off! This lesson can be easily organized outdoors too, for example in a forest.

Allow children to move, test, try, investigate and have fun!

REFLECTION

Next, it's reflection time. Ask children what they learned and what they think you could have done differently. Brunn says the answers will help you end the lesson thoughtfully.

During reflection time, you can have a relaxation moment and for example give a little leg massage after all the jumping.

How to get there depends on your starting point and the state of guidelines for early childhood education in your country. Often this is referred to as the “curriculum”, but the term itself has different meanings in different countries or even between professionals themselves.

DIFFERENT VIEW OF “CURRICULUM” AS STARTING POINT

In Finland the national / city / kindergarten specific curriculum means a guideline of how to work and sets the pedagogical objectives. It doesn't specify milestones for children's learning or lesson plans that should be run.

Some other countries consider the word curriculum as a syllabus consisting of preplanned lesson plans for a term. While other countries see curriculum as a set of milestones / learning objectives that children should get to practice and reach.

None of these alone gives a complete answer for how to go ahead to provide quality education!

SOLUTION TO GO FORWARD

No matter what curriculum means to you or in which country you live in:

For quality education, teaching activities must be goal-oriented and organized in a purposeful manner.

Building on your starting point and expanding it, you should take the whole learning process into consideration:

1. Set the pedagogical objectives for children’s learning.
2. Plan the lessons to match the objectives, taking children's interests into consideration.
3. Observe and document the learning moments and engage families.
4. Assess and reflect on the learning and plan future learning.

KINDIEDAYS PEDAGOGCAL MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Kindiedays supports the whole learning process in a flexible way so you can build on what you already have in place.

First, Kindiedays can offer the Finnish curriculum’s pedagogical objectives that in addition to children’s own interests guide the activity planning. But you can also use your own pedagogical objectives as starting point.

High quality pedagogy helps for example when children get restless or when situations need more focus for learning. But what is pedagogy in practice?

You might understand quickly that you need to promote pedagogy for exaple when children are queuing to wash hands or while they wait for story time to begin.

Simply, pedagogy is - or at least it should be - present in all moments of the day that a teacher spends with children. Pedagogy does not play a part only during circle times, pedagogy is there all the time, all the way from morning to afternoon.

Pedagogy can be seen in guided activities, when supporting children's play, in transition moments, when eating or resting and in all other moments that teacher encounters children.

Test and wear 'pedagogical glasses' for a day

It is worth while to stop and think through your day with 'pedagogical glasses' on. You can assess and notice the weak points of the day and start to develop them. Think for example:

• What moments are stressful?
• When are the children restless?
• Are there moments when sensitive interaction with the children does not come true?

Discuss with your team and search for solutions together. You might understand quickly that you need to promote pedagogy for exaple when children are queuing to wash hands or while they wait for story time to begin.

How to enhance restless moments and add high quality pedagogy to the day?

1. Use poems and songs when children are in the queue - time goes faster when you sing and children get to practice new songs and participate.
2. Add pictures and visual sings to the walls where children can see them, for example on how to wash hands properly, so that children can practice handwashing moves while they wait.
3. Add more adults' presence to the hectic and stressful moments.

The core idea is to understand the child's point of view. How does the child see this situation? What means versatile and safe early childhood education to the child? How can we support the child's wellbeing, growth, development and learning throughout the day? Teacher can see the child's side by observing closely, interacting in a sensitive manner and helping the child to name and show his feelings.

What is then the worst thing that prevents pedagogical early childhood education from happening?

The absolute NO's in early childhood education are:

• Educator's closed mind that only follows everyday routines as changing diapers like a robot.
• Treating all the children similarly without noticing their personalities and unique needs and different ways to communicate.
• Doing the job similarly as it was done 20 years ago.

→ This kind of thinking does not support high quality pedagogy nor children's learning.

High quality pedagogy is based on warm and sensitive interaction with the children. <3 The core idea is to understand the child's point of view.

Happy encounters!

References: Liisa Ahonen & Piia Roos. 2021. Untuvikot - alle 3-vuotiaiden pedagogiikka. (Untuvikot - pedagogy with children under 3y.)