Baby-led planning: What is it and how do you do it?

In this blogpost, I’m going to share the principles of baby-led planning:

• What is it?
• How do we do it?

As I talk it through, I’ll prompt you to go through a process relating to the babies in your baby room so that you can do some baby-led planning while you’re reading.

What is baby-led planning?

Baby-led planning is the process of responding to individual babies’ fascinations and enabling these to drive the learning and inquiry that unfolds in the baby room. It involves:

1. Noticing babies’ fascinations. I use the word ‘fascinations’ rather than ‘interests’, because it speaks to younger babies’ engagements. While we tend to think about interests as bigger topics (e.g. vehicles, animals), the term ‘fascinations’ opens up how we see babies’ engagement with the world around them. For example, babies are often fascinated by particular sounds or by the quality of the light as it comes into the room.
2. Responding in the moment to an individual baby’s fascination with curiosity and skill, so that we are sustaining and extending the baby’s engagement. You might know about this as a serve and return interaction.
3. Recording the moment of fascination as a stepping stone to future planning. While with serve and return interactions, we stay in the moment, with baby-led planning, it is helpful to have a way of recording what comes up in these moments and what we learn from them. For example, we might have a moment responding to a baby’s fascination with a small metal whisk, but we also want to find a chance later on in the day to jot down the fascination (e.g. ‘Nina is fascinated by the feeling of metal’).
4. Based on this recording, we can then introduce resources and activities that respond to the fascination. In this blogpost, I’ll share with you a planning template that you can use to get started with planning based on a particular fascination.  
5. Over time, babies’ fascinations become the lines of learning and inquiry for the whole room. This means that while a baby’s fascination – such as the feel of metal – is the starting point, we bring this exploration and curiosity to all of the babies. Babies’ fascinations inform the planning for the whole room, and this is why we call it ‘baby-led planning’.

How do we do baby-led planning?

Let’s look at the five steps involved in baby-led planning.

Step one: Notice and engage with babies’ fascinations

To discover fascinations, ask the questions:

• What has the baby’s attention?
• What are they looking at?
• What are they mouthing, grasping for or picking up?
• Where are they pointing?
• What is making them babble?

Think about the babies in your room at the moment. Jot down a moment recently – ideally in the last day or week – where you noticed that one of the babies was fascinated by something in particular. How did you see their fascination unfolding? What helped you to understand what they were fascinated by?

Step two: Record babies’ fascinations

There are different ways of recording babies’ fascinations and you might already have a system for this in your room. If not, a simple approach that you can take is to keep a fascination mind-map for each of the babies pinned to your wall. In some settings, it will be a whiteboard, but it doesn’t need to be – a big sheet of paper works just as well.

Here’s an example of what this mind-map might look like. The educators in Nina’s baby room have noticed fascinations with the sky, spiders, music and so on. They’ve jotted down keywords to help them to remember these fascinations so that they can become the basis of planning.

What system do you use at the moment in your baby room for recording babies’ fascinations? How easy is it for everyone in the room to contribute to this record? How time-consuming is it, or can it be done spontaneously and quickly? Given what you’ve read so far, are there any changes you’d like to make to the system you use?

Step three: Pick a focus to prompt planning

Once you have the fascination mind-maps for all the babies, you’ll need to pick a focus that can then prompt planning. You can simply look at one of the mind-maps and choose a focus. This is a lovely activity to do as a team, because it’s quick but impactful in making everyone feel more involved in planning.

How often an individual baby’s fascination turns up in the weekly planning will depend on how many babies you have and how much else is going on in your room. You’ll need to do a bit of trial and error to get to a process that feels right. As a starting point, choose one fascination for your weekly planning and try to integrate this. Over time, it might feel right to choose more or to hold onto them for longer.

For example, based on Nina’s fascination mind-map, we might choose that for the coming week we’re going to integrate some planning around a fascination with the moon in the daytime sky.

Step four: Plan!

You can use this simple planning template to work out how to respond to the focus you’ve chosen through activities, resources, outings and even through your parent partnership.

What you’ll notice about this template is that we’re not just brainstorming what resources and what activities can be brought into the mix, but we’re also being intentional about when and how these will show up during the week. For example, it’s wonderful to think about vocabulary that is connected to the fascination that you’re working with, but unless you’re clear with the team about the opportunities for this vocabulary to show up, it probably just won’t be used. You need to be intentional about how you’re going to incorporate books, songs, resources, vocabulary, provocations, outings and suggestions to parents/carers. It is better to have fewer planning ideas but have a clear plan for integrating what you’ve planned, than to come up with a plethora of ideas that are then not used.

Step five: Monitor and extend

To maximise the impact of your planning, you’ll need to keep going back to it and updating it based on the experiences in the room. After a few days into the focus, you might want to take another look at the plan with your team and look out for opportunities to extend what you’re doing or swap in ideas based on what you see working.

The example below shows how we can keep going back to our planning document to enrich what we’re offering. This living document can be pinned to the wall in a place accessible to all staff, so that ideas can be added as and when they arrive rather than waiting for a formal  team gathering.

Where to start

There is a lot here to consider and think through. Here are some easy ways to turn what you’ve just read into an action that can help to improve practice in the baby room.

• Share the idea of baby-led planning with your team and talk about whether it might be right for you and how you could trial it
• Congratulate yourself and your team on the baby-led planning you’re already doing
• Try it out with just one fascination this week and see what happens
• Get in touch with me with questions or to talk through experiences of using baby-led planning in your baby room: mona@babyrooms-inspiringleaders.co.uk

Don’t forget to download or order your free copy of ‘The Baby Room: A Practical Guide for Early Years Educators’!