Pre-school Education and Activity Planning
Framework
The National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage (2022) covers three years of pre-school plus two years of primary. Pre-school education is play-based, child-centred and delivered in the mother tongue; formal teaching of reading and writing is not appropriate at 3–6 years.
Planning an activity
Choose a theme from the children's immediate environment. Write objectives across domains - language, cognitive, motor, socio-emotional. Build a daily rhythm: arrival and free play, circle time, guided activity, rhyme and story, creative work, outdoor play, meal and rest. Balance quiet and active, individual and group, indoor and outdoor. Use low-cost and no-cost teaching-learning material: bottle caps, seeds, cloth, clay, pictures.
Worked example
Theme "Animals around us" for four-year-olds. Monday: picture talk and animal sounds. Tuesday: sorting big and small animal cut-outs. Wednesday: clay modelling. Thursday: rhyme with actions. Friday: walk to a nearby cattle shed, then drawing. Objectives: naming five animals (language), sorting by size (cognitive), sharing clay (socio-emotional), hopping like animals (motor). Assessment is by observation checklist, not a written test.
Traps
Writing a beautiful timetable that is never followed; replacing play with worksheets; choosing themes unrelated to local life; cutting outdoor play for "academic" work; assessing children by marks instead of observation notes.