EYFS Continuous Provision

What is Continuous Provision?

Early Years education is special and unique with its focus on child development, effective learning characteristics and holistic approaches. In fact, the Early Years is so unique that it has its own terminology: terms like ‘enhancements’ and ‘continuous provision’ are part of the language of our Early Years practice at Piddle Valley.

Continuous Provision describes all of the different provision areas which are available for your children to use every day. Within each of these areas of provision there are a core range of resources that children can use all of the time, throughout the whole year. 
 
Our carefully planned Continuous Provision enables our children to learn skills, challenges their thinking and helps them to embed concepts. It also provides the context for a variety of learning conversations between children and adults with rich opportunities for modelling and extending speech and vocabulary. It is within this learning environment that the children will also develop key learning attributes. How our environment is planned, resourced, valued and used impacts positively on children’s engagement, independence, collaboration, self-confidence, resilience and curiosity.
 
In the EYFS at Piddle Valley, we follow the Literacy Shed approach to Continuous Provision, adapting their planners to fit our children and their interests.  This gives our children the opportunity to be active, independent learners. We believe that our Continuous Provision should evolve with the interests of the children and the theme or topic our adult-led learning is currently focused on. We utilise the Literacy Shed Continuous Provision planning as a 'starting point' and enhance this with our pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of the EYFS Curriculum and knowledge of our children and their interests. We support this with Continuous Provision planning from Early Excellence. Examples of our starting points can be found below.