Short-term planning

Short-term planning builds on your long-term and medium-term plans. It involves more detailed planning of opportunities and activities over the next few days.

Your short-term planning should build on your children’s responses to previous activities and opportunities. You should also be prepared to respond in the moment to new opportunities for learning (e.g. a local or national event), and to the emerging needs and interests of each child. Remember to ensure that you will still fully develop learning towards all the curriculum learning statements across the year.  

The template you decide to use for your short-term plan will be depend on own context (e.g. how many adults you have available to support your children’s learning) and your school planning policy.

The example short-term plan below is for one day from Week 3 of the ‘Example medium-term plan for EY1 Block 1’:

Example EY1 Block 1 Week 3 short-term plan

Related example EY1 Block 1 medium-term plan

Example short-term plan template

Note: The level of detail in the example short-term plan aims to demonstrate the thinking behind the planning. Your own short-term planning might be less detailed.

The example short-term plan exemplifies what you might think about during your short-term planning. The activities in the Cambridge Early Years Teacher’s Book are designed to support this thinking, but you will also need to consider how you will use or adapt the activities most effectively in your own setting.

Things to think about during short-term planning

1. A balance of opportunities that support a play-based approach

Ask yourself:

  • Are there enough opportunities for child-initiated play?
  • How might we build on child-initiated play to develop learning towards the learning statements? (guided play)
  • Are the adult-led activities playful? Could they be less adult-led?

See ‘Teaching and learning approaches: A play-based approach’ for more guidance.
2. How adult-led activities will be organised
Ask yourself:
  • For whole-class activities, how will we involve all children?
  • Will each child have appropriate adult guidance across each day?
  • Will small group activities be disruptive to other children?
  • Are there outdoor opportunities as well as indoor opportunities?

3. The curriculum learning statements that will be developed

Ask yourself:

  • How do the activities and opportunities develop learning towards the learning statements?
  • Are we developing skills as well as knowledge and understanding, including skills for thinking mathematically and thinking scientifically?
  • Is there a balance of learning across curriculum areas each day?

4. Resources

Ask yourself:

  • What do we need to prepare in advance?
  • What extra resources might help us to provide support or challenge?

5. Key vocabulary

Ask yourself:

  • What vocabulary do children need to achieve the learning statement?
  • What vocabulary do children need to access an activity (e.g. to understand a story)?
  • What vocabulary might be new to some or all children?
  • What vocabulary will we need to model most carefully?

6. Adult input

Ask yourself:

  • Where will I focus my input and observations?
  • How can other adults in the setting develop learning most effectively?

7. Opportunities for continuous assessment

Ask yourself:

  • How will you know if a child has achieved the learning statement?
  • What will we look out for? What questions will we ask? What misconceptions might we need to address?

See ‘Assessment guidance’ for more guidance on assessment, including recording your children’s progress.

8. Ideas for support and challenge

Ask yourself:

  • Are the activities and opportunities inclusive? Do they enable all children to participate and succeed?
  • How will we identify when a child needs more support or challenge?
  • How will we ensure appropriate challenge?
  • How will we provide support when a child needs it?

See ‘Inclusive learning’ for more guidance.

9. Other focuses for individual children

Ask yourself:

  • What needs did we observe in previous weeks/days for individual children or groups of children? How will we support these individual needs?
  • What interests did we observe in previous weeks/days for individual children or groups of children? How can we support these individual interests?

Things to think about after teaching and learning

Reflection and evaluation on the activities and opportunities you provide is very useful. It will inform your future short-term planning. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you to reflect on activities:

  • How did our planning help us to respond to each child’s needs? What changes did we make from the plan? Why?
  • What did each child achieve today? What progress did they make?
  • Are we ready to move on? If not, which learning statements do we need to revisit with all or some children? If we are ready, what is the next step for progression?
  • Is there anything we need to remember when using this activity with other children?