August runs on a looser rhythm. Mixed-age rooms, holiday-club energy, half the usual routines suspended and the garden open all day. Somewhere in this week’s happy drift, a child found a snail on the path, and the practitioner who crouched down beside them for ten minutes did the best teaching of the day. None of it was on a plan.
That, in miniature, is in-the-moment planning: the idea that the richest learning happens when adults notice what a child is doing right now and respond skilfully, rather than steering everyone back to what was written down last Thursday. And a quiet August is the perfect month to try it properly.
First, the myths
In-the-moment planning has collected some baggage, so let’s clear it. It isn’t “no planning”. It isn’t an excuse to wing it, and it certainly isn’t abandoning your curriculum. The intent, what you want children to learn and why, stays firmly in place. What changes is the route: instead of pre-written activities marching everyone through the week, the adult meets children where their attention already is and teaches from there.
Nor does it mean adults doing less. If anything it asks more of them. Following a plan is straightforward; reading a moment, deciding whether to join, and knowing what this child needs next takes real skill. The paperwork gets lighter. The thinking doesn’t.
The teachable moment, and the art of not squashing it
Back to the snail. The unskilled response is to turn it into a lesson: seize the moment, deliver ten facts about molluscs, watch the child drift away. The skilled response starts with watching. What is the child actually curious about? The trail, the spiral, the way it retreats when touched? Wonder aloud alongside them. Add a word they don’t have yet. Ask one genuine question, not a testing one, and be prepared to say nothing at all if the play is doing the work.
Knowing when to step in and when to stay out is the whole craft of the adult role in child-led play. Step in too fast and you take the play over; hang back too far and a teachable moment slides past. The judgement improves with practice, and with a team that talks about it openly.
Your environment is quietly half the method. A well-resourced room, with open-ended materials children can reach and combine, generates teachable moments all day without an activity plan in sight. In that sense the environment is your planning partner: you set it up thoughtfully in advance, then let it do its work. Our In-the-Moment Planning and Child-Led Practice course covers all of this, from the adult’s role in quality interactions to using the environment well.
Record less, notice more
The paperwork question comes up in every staff room, so here’s the honest answer: proportionate. You don’t need to document every interaction to prove learning happened; a few significant observations, captured well, beat forty rushed photos with captions nobody rereads. The hours saved go back into the thing that actually matters, which is being present enough to notice the next snail.
If you fancy introducing the approach, start small rather than announcing a revolution in the September staff meeting. One room, one session a day, this month, while numbers are lighter and the pace is kind. Talk about what you noticed at the end of each week. Keep your curriculum intent visible throughout so nobody mistakes responsiveness for aimlessness. By autumn you’ll know what works in your setting, and you’ll have stories to win over the sceptics.
Teach from the moments children hand you
The course covers what in-the-moment planning really is, responding to teachable moments, proportionate paperwork and introducing the approach without losing curriculum intent, with an NFAQ-accredited certificate included.
The snails are out there every morning, and so are the moments. This summer, while the days are slow enough to practise, is the time to learn to catch them.