In this episode, Claire interviews Anna Lucas at the Lead, Learn, Lancs conference. Anna is an Early Years specialist who is committed to supporting practitioners and improving outcomes for young children. She has also worked extensively as a phonics consultant with managers in local authorities, schools and settings to embed good practice. Alongside this, she is also a children’s author following the publication of her first book ‘Sir Undercracker’.
Anna talks passionately about the value of continuous provision when it is utilised to its full potential. She firmly believes that teachers need to immerse themselves in the learning opportunities alongside their children to support children in making important learning connections.
She shares practical tips for the classroom and encourages teachers to trial a new approach in the expectation that they will quickly notice the rapid improvement in the quality of teaching and learning.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Continuous ProvisionContinuous provision is planned, purposeful and open-ended play which is commonplace in nursery and reception classrooms. Despite its widespread presence, it is not always utilised to its full potential. Research indicates that it takes hundreds of repetitions of a task or concept for the brain to make learning connections, but only around twenty repetitions during guided play. The same dramatic impact cannot be seen by free play without adults having some direct involvement with the children.
Step away from the blue table!In some classrooms, adults can be found sat down at “the blue table” with a small group of children while the rest roam free and play however Anna advises that this set-up does not make the best use of continuous provision. The children begin to make a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’ and the resources in place do not reach their full potential. Anna suggests preparing play-based activities for the teacher to invite the children to join in with allowing opportunities for children to learn without realising. This leaves children more likely to repeat and apply those skills to other scenarios and games. Children mimic everything we do. If we want children to learn how to learn using continuous provision, we need to be in there with them modelling how it’s done.
“I wonder what would happen if…”Rather than setting up staged activities or directly asking questions to assess if children have met learning objectives, Anna suggests that whilst playing with the children, you can incorporate key questions into those conversations. For example, when you are covering positional language, you could say something like, “I wonder what would happen if you put that frog in the water.” These suggestions can then be adapted to suit the ability of each child. This allows teachers to sensitively, skilfully, surreptitiously and subtly lead and extend the children’s learning.


ElklanElklan offer speech and language training courses for educators and parents. They focus on how communication is developed in early years. Anna discusses how we can often overload children with questions and how starting questions with “I wonder if…” helps children to feel that there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer giving them more freedom to think and ponder before they answer. She shares the concept of the ‘question hand’ where for every question, you also offer a comment, repetition, expansion and explanation.


Speak less.It can take children 10 seconds to process language. When children pause following a question or comment, don’t feel you need to dive in and ask more questions. This limits the conversation, resets the communication, overloads the children and can lead us to answer for them.


Play PlenariesAnna suggests taking photos of the children learning then putting them up on display at the end for children to talk about what they were doing and in turn what they learnt. This simple activity strengthens the value of continuous provision.

BEST MOMENTS
“Play needs to