Does anyone work in a pre school can I have an insight into how you write your planning and how you follow the childrens interest???

[Allthreerolledintoone]

Do you have a set topic each week?? How do you include the interests of the children in your planning. Currently in our setting we write notes about what the children are saying or interested in the we use that as our too for the next week but I am finding the children are doing the same things each week. So we have trains, bears, transport, it just repeats itself. We then have a specific area and the prime area that we are focussing on for adult led activities. We then add our focus children who are working on these areas into the plans.
I'm looking at other ways of doing it and other ideas. Impersonally like the idea of a set topic but my manager doesn't.

we have a medium term plan that lasts a month
it mostly follows the children's interests and also include s things that we want them to learn. this month we are doing superheroes from the children's interests. we also have a weekly plan that the key person fills in for their keychildren. this plan is divided into the areas learning and the key person adds activities and experiences and adds the children's initials.
we use our observations and comments from parents and what the children have said.

Observe children

Look at how we can extend on their learning

Use this to plan activities

Our children are 3-4 years old.

We don't have any set topics. All of our planning comes from our observations of the children. The 'plan' itself is just a starting point, as it needs to be flexible & responsive to the individual children.

In our medium/long term plans we would have acknowledgement of things that would happen at the same time every year- e.g September- PSE: settling in, self-help skills... July: transition to school etc... December: festive holidays celebrations. We would aim to make this individual by working with parents & family to plan for how these things are relevant to the individuals attending.

We make regular observations (written & informal) then share these at a weekly meeting where we plan 'what next' steps together. We have short informal chats at the end of every day to discuss how the environment was used, whether anything needs changing or extending.

We aim to extend or support the interest, or combine it with an area of development. For example, we may have observed that a child loves cars and always plays with the same car mat & cars, but is not yet interested in mark making, so we might plan to put cars in paint, or use big paper to draw roads etc...

We put these observations in 'profile books' with photos & pieces of work so parents & children can reflect on their interests & how we extended it over their time at the setting. We have 'what next planning sheets' so we can see what we need to set up and when. We try & make 'what next' extension plans happen as soon as possible after the observation, so that it is still relevant to the children involved. Events like baking or outings might need to be planned far in advance, according to use of kitchen/ratios/funding etc...

If a few children have the same or similar interests (e.g transport) we might plan some bigger projects- turn the role play area into a mechanics or train station, put a few transport books out onto the bookshelf. Not everyone would need to be involved in that project though, and the project would last for as long as children at interested, as it usually evolves into something new.

What do you do if your focus children don't like bears, trains & transport? How do you extend the interests of your children when they aren't the focus child?