Early Years Practitioner Guidance (Copy)

Types of play: 

Adult-led activities

Adult-led activities are more structured planned activities where an adult directs children to develop learning towards a specific curriculum learning statement. For example, the adult might engage children in a specific activity which develops a fundamental mathematics or phonics concept.   Adult-led activities can still be playful.

As an example of an adult-led activity, you might plan an activity to:

• model and develop counting of cardboard fish in a pretend river, to build on prior learning of the number sequence through the number rhyme ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5 once I caught a fish alive’ 
• introduce and play a phonics game where you give the end of a word (e.g. -‘at’) and children take turns to reveal a letter from a pack of letter cards (selected to create real words), and make and say a word (e.g. mat, cat, fat, bat). They collect a counter for each word they say correctly and an extra counter if they can say a sentence containing the word. 

You can use adult-led activities alongside child-initiated play and guided play activities to help you to better evaluate children’s progress towards specific curriculum learning statements, and to inform next steps for teaching and learning opportunities. Especially in EY3, adult-led activities can also help to prepare children for their transition to more formal active learning approaches in primary school.

This video contains a reflection on, and an example of, adult-led activity. It also includes an example of where a teacher is able to incorporate a planned approach to a play scenario, to support inclusive learning:  

    

Video transcript - Adult-led activity