When planning class activities, where do you strike the balance between leaving out familiar favorites all the time versus continuously bringing in new activities?

Young kids have a couple essential key needs for brain development:

• novelty – experiencing things for the first time;
• repetition – doing things again and again till they master them;
• downtime – when they can just putter around without pressure to follow some adult agenda; and
• a sense of safety and happiness.

Finding a balance between these components is key. Every teacher in every setting will find a slightly different balance point. Here are things to consider.

Novelty – New Activities

Some teachers focus on novelty. In a class for babies to young toddlers, different toys are offered over the course of the year, from the simplest developmental level to more advanced as their skills grow. A toddler class might have a monthly theme, like apples/school theme in September, a farm and pumpkins theme in October, and fall leaves in November. So new things are always rotating in. My science enrichment classes have a new theme every week: from simple machines to chemistry to sink and float. Twelve activities all tied to one science concept helps them to grasp that concept. The next week it’s all something new to teach a new idea.

Benefits to novelty:

• new things can be super fun and exciting!
• new themes bring in new vocabulary and new things to learn about, broadening the children’s experience of the world
• new tools build new skills
• if, like me, you have a novelty seeking brain, it gives you an excuse to keep searchng for new ideas for your class
• if you have a whole storeroom of fabulous activities and toys, having themes helps you remember to rotate them all in at some point in the year
• parents tend to love seeing new things in class, and love seeing your “plan” for the month. They are more likely to see this as learning than when they see their child repeat an activity again and again (see below for how to talk with them about the benefits of repetition)

Downsides to novelty:

• takes a lot more planning time for teachers (often unpaid), and a lot more set-up and re-set time
• requires owning a lot more toys and supplies – harder for a start-up
• kids may be sad when a favorite activity disappears
• kids don’t have a chance to master anything fully before you’ve moved on to something new

Repetition

Benefits

As a teacher, you may understand these benefits to repetition – allowing a child to work with the same materials week after week. But it helps to have ways to explain them to parents.

Having access to familiar materials:

• is calming and reassuring to kids when they know what to expect
• allows them to focus on their current interests without flashy new things distracting them
• lets children play more independently, as they already know what’s available and how to use it
• kids may be more willing to take turns, and to put toys away at the end of the day, or walk away from an activity because they can trust that it will be there when they return
• children may plan ahead – arriving at school in the morning with an idea for how to continue what they were working on the previous day
• open-ended toys, like blocks, and loose play items can be played with in endless new ways, stretching a child’s skills and allowing them to explore lots of ideas

Seeing the Benefits

One year, I did monthly visits to a site where most of the materials were exactly the same each week. The teacher would add a couple new art projects each week, add a new item to the science area once a week, and rotate books once a month. But the gym was always the same, the same building materials all year, the same pretend play materials all the time… Their outdoor play area was just a strip of grass with a couple trees – sometimes she would bring out some balls or bubbles or “gems” to hide in the grass, but really not much.

Part of me judged her for this… I thought she needed to be doing a lot more. And yet…

Those kids were so confident in their space – they knew exactly where to find everything and how it all worked. Their pretend play was rich and involved, and very collaborative as they co-created things like making a “bus” with six chairs lined up and talking about all the places they would go. Their block play was much richer and more nuanced than I see at my class where I’m always bringing in new materials. And outdoors, they played so many social games, like tag and hide and seek, than I typically see with kids this age who have access to playground equipment. In general, the day was much more child-led, with the teacher supporting their play ideas, than it is in a class where the teacher has been working hard on bringing in her own ideas to guide kids through.

Now, it’s important to note that what made this an effective play-based class was that the teacher was not just sitting back and doing nothing as the kids play with the same toys. Instead, this highly-engaged teacher was absolutely moving around and stretching the kids’ play, scaffolding in new ideas and helping to guide their learning.

Downsides

What are the downsides to repetition? A child might get bored of the same old thing (though less often than you might think!) or they might not get exposed to as many new ideas and skills as in a novelty-based classroom. But generally the kids are pretty content with the same thing day after day.

However, the parents might not be.Sometimes when a parent sees the same materials out in the classroom week after week, they may wonder whether the teacher is “trying hard enough” to bring in new activities, or they may wonder whether they should choose a school that owns more stuff so more toys and supplies are available to their child.

It’s important for teachers to be able to explain to parents the benefits of repetition. And to show them how it is an intentional curricular choice – not just “being lazy.” Be able to speak about how the children’s play is evolving and getting more sophisticated with time.

Everyday Stations – Continuous Provision

Try looking up “continuous provision early years” for lots of thoughtful articles on the benefits of having some consistent stations and supplies available for long periods of time. Examples include:

• Writing and mark-making area – pencils, crayons, markers and paper always available for children to create their own work
• Reading area – always a collection of picture books available
• Construction – wooden blocks or Legos or similar
• Small world: vehicles (cars or trains), toy animals, dolls
• Sensory bin and/or water table with tools and containers
• Pretend Play area – dress-up, kitchen, etc.
• Play-dough station or an art table

These things are just out on the table or out on the shelves for kids to access freely when they choose. They are easy for a teacher as they can remain the same for a long time with only very occasional rotations or just dropping in new ideas occasionally when you have a little extra time. (Learn more about stations.)

Mixing Novelty into Stations

Enhanced Provision is the idea of temporarily adding in items or enhancements to a continuous offering. This might be guided by the current interests of kids in the class – for example, if several kids are excited about dinosaurs right now, you can find places to incorporate them. It might be guided by your own choice of seasonal themes – in October maybe it’s lots of pumpkins. Or you may see an area your kids need more practice in to build their skills so you bring that focus in for a while.

I typically think of these mix-ins as “invitations to play.” Kids who are ready to stretch beyond the familiar practices at a station will be excited by this novelty. Others may prefer to stick to their previous play plans.

Adding to a Station

• writing station – offer rubber stamps or stencils that match into a seasonal theme; have a “tool of the week” to skill build – like a scissor practice week or a hole punch project; add a prompt related to class topics – “draw a picture of something you saw on our field trip”
• reading area – If you’ve read something in group time, be sure it’s available for them to “read” to themselves for several days after that; offer props related to a book, like a felt board or puppets to allow them to act out a story; offer books related to holidays, seasons, or upcoming events
• construction – mix in small world items – like I added wooden farm animals to the wood blocks area for a while, or plastic zoo animals; issue a challenge – what’s the tallest building you can build? Make a prediction and test it; offer pictures of famous buildings – can you build this; offer a clipboard and paper so they can draw a picture of their creation. (Check out my post on all the ways to learn to build.)
• For sensory play, check out my “ultimate guides” to sensory bins and water tables which talk about a “recipe” of: sensory material, scoops, containers, and mix-ins for an infinite variety of combinations.
• Pretend play – check out the “props” section of my post on supporting pretend play for ideas.
• art area – I have an idea in mind for a progession of skills through the year, so my projects use that. For two year olds, we start the “adhesives curriculum” with sticky collage (Contact paper with the sticky side up that they can stick bits to), then tape loops on paper where they can stick items to the tape, then glue sticks, then glue with a paint brush, then tape, then squeeze bottles of Elmer’s glue so that over the course of the year they master lots of ways to stick things together. (For a great fleixble on-going art station, check out the concept of creation station.)

You can also shake up any familiar activity by introducing a hidey hole component.

Teacher’s Role in Continuous Provision

Here’s how Aaron Poyser describes it:

• Join in and model: play alongside children, model language and skills, and think aloud.
• Ask open questions: “What do you think will happen if…?”, “How did you work that out?”, “How could we make it taller?”
• Extend thinking: stay with a child’s idea long enough to build on it together, rather than moving quickly on.
• Observe and notice: who uses which areas, who needs more support, and what to teach or add next.
• Teach in the moment: use provision to revisit phonics, number and vocabulary from the day’s teaching.

More ideas for early childhood teachers.