One of the areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is Creative Development. This means that children in the EYFS must be provided with the opportunity for curiosity, exploration and play, to explore and share their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of different mediums – art, music, movement, dance, imaginative and role play activities, mathematics, design and technology.
By the end of the EYFS children should be able to:
- Respond in a variety of ways to what they see, hear, smell, touch and feel
- Express and communicate their ideas, thoughts and feelings by using a widening range of materials, suitable tools, imaginative and roleplay, movement, designing and making, and a variety of songs and musical instruments
- Explore colour, texture, shape, form and space in two or three dimensions
- Recognise and explore how sounds can be changed, sing simple songs from memory, recognise repeated sounds and sound patterns and match movements to music
- Use their imagination in art and design, music, dance, imaginative and role-play and stories
Play activities that encourage children to achieve these outcomes include:
- Arts and crafts activities
- Junk modelling
- Playing with play dough / plasticine / clay
- Using vocabulary to talk about observations and experiences, for example, ‘smooth’, ‘shiny’, ‘rough’, ‘prickly’, ‘flat’, ‘patterned’, ‘jagged’, ‘bumpy’, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’
- Talking about colours and why they like them
- Listening to music from different cultures
- Looking at a variety of pictures, paintings, sculptures and talking about what it means
- Watching different types of dance – ballet, ballroom, street dance
- Making things with papier-mâché
- Making things with Wikki Stix
- Building and constuction play
- Design work, e.g. t-shirt decorating, futuristic cars or homes
Singing songs- Listening to poetry and rhymes
- Dancing
- Making musical instruments, e.g. shakers, elastic band guitars, panpipes and drums
- Using musical instruments to enhance singing or to compose music
- Playing with puppets and putting on puppet shows
- Face painting
- Small world play
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