Now is the time to plan for 2013

January 2013 and all the world has made (and already broken) resolutions, as well as making plans for the year.  Why should professional nannies be any exception?

1. Buy a large Page a Day Diary and use it to:

• mark all the family birthdays, with ages for the children.  (You can't make cards for Mummy's birthday if you don't know when it is!)

• mark any special occasions the family always celebrates

• record all school/preschool holidays and public holidays

• record any known appointments the children have

Keep this up to date, adding appointments, pick up times, play dates etc.

Parents can also use the diary to give feedback on the work you are doing.

2. Divide each page so there is a section for each child

• use these sections each week to plan the activities for each child, what you hope to achieve, and how each child reacts.

• make your diary available to the parents so they can see what you are doing with their children and how their children are developing.

While this may seem over the top, it it will stop you getting into a rut of doing the same things every day, or every week...they are familiar, the children enjoy them, they don't take much preparation or thought.  To keep yourself feeling fresh, to stop the children being bored and to extend their interests, skills and abilities variety is important.  So while drawing might be a frequent activity, vary it: subjects or free drawing, with different coloured and textured paper, different crayons, pens, pencils, chalks to draw outside etc.

Most modern early educators will follow the children's interests in preparing activities rather than working by topics eg the seasons, colours, weather etc, but using the children's interests does not do away with the need to plan appropriate activities.  Nor does it stop us from pointing out things that might interest children.  Pointing out a fluffy white cloud might interest one child, and lead to lots of learning opportunities while to another it might be 'ho hum, so what? Look at that car!'  Flexibility and different activities for different children of different ages and stages of development!

3. Develop your resource kits. Nannies who have been working for a number of years should have an excellent range of art and craft activities, play ideas for indoors and out, songs and games, books and internet resources.  How do you keep all this excellent information in a way that you can easily access it?
Possible ways include by:

• age range eg babies, toddlers, pre-schoolers and school aged

• type of activity eg craft (you might want to break this up into subdivisions like pasting, wool crafts, egg carton crafts etc), art, songs, stories, outdoor games, indoor games

• topics eg seasons, Christmas, nature (you might want to break this down eg trees, flowers, snails, caterpillars, butterflies), outings

It is also useful to cross reference your resources, or use colour coding eg mark crafts by colours for different ages.
It is also helpful to put comments after you have used different resources about how difficult you and the children found them and any ways you adapted them.

Links:
Early Years Learning Framework can be downloaded from this site.

Childhood101 Playopedia

Nurture Store is an excellent British resource including a weekly play planner.

Let the Children Play is an Australian site with many great ideas as well as being a great promoter of play and playfulness.

Enchanted Learning has a marvellous range of ideas on all sorts of subjects.

Sun Hats and Wellie Boots as the name suggests , is also British with many original ideas.



Those who need help with how to plan might find inspiration from Planning with Kids

Keep watching our Facebook page for ideas from many different Australian and overseas resources.