Central Features of teaching the Early Learner Allison Jenson and Emily Pletscher
Learning Spaces: The making of a welcoming and safe learning enviornment for a student can supports a students exploration, inquiry, creativity, risk-taking, and learning through play.
Play: A careful balance of student and teacher led experiences can lead to social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development
Symbolic Exploration and Expression: Developing a student's communication (listen, speak, and understand/use symbols) and generalizing it to other contexts develops and builds a students cognition.
Adaptive
Teachers should notice thinking processes and adapt
Teachers should monitor and adapt to match student skills and learning
Choice/Agency
Teachers are responsible for creating engaging spaces for play
Teachers should create time for both indoor and outdoor play and monitor and adapt based on student interest and skill
Inquiry
Play is naturally filled with moments for inquiry
Play is how kids make meaning out of things
Play allows kids to create evolving models of how the world works
Relationships with learners and families: School is a learner's first experience with the environment of relationships, strong relationships can positively impact a child's learning, behavior, well being, and health
Teacher/Student
Acknowledging and celebrating individual students
Allowing for Agency and student choice
Allowing time and space for play
Allowing and encouraging students to self-regulate throughout the day
School/ Family
Regular conversations with parents/guardians
Acknowledging the achievements of students with their families and with them as individuals
Choice/Agency
Include students in creating the learning environment.
Create learning spaces which are based on student need and interests.
Create authentic learning spaces through by providing open-ended materials.
Technology
Build inquiry vs. master technology
Choice/Agency
Include a variety of digital and non-digital
Explore and test theories about functionality through touching, seeing, and hearing.
Social Skills
Provide leaning opportunities for both group and individual play.
Include students in creating communication signals
Listenting to students language, teachers can build knowledge of student's mental models and create learning enviornments which are personalized to a students language capabilities.
Strategies to build language
Play
Stories
Songs
Conversations
Encourages negotiating, turn-taking, expressing needs/wants, share information.
Teachers model language through think-alouds.
Role-playing stories builds comprehension and understanding of print media.
Builds vocabulary
Incorporating with physical movement supports students comprehension and use of concepts, sentence structure, vocabulary, graphemic and phonemic awareness.
Ask open-ended questions to promote thinking
Our Reflection on changes we will make in the classroom:
-Providing language and tools to promote the inquiry in play.
Our reflection on changes to practice: Provide more open ended materials
Reflection on changes to practice: Providing more resources that parents and students can use to connect to learning at school while at home.
Reflection on changes to practice: Role playing at movement in stories