What a difference a week makes……

A “shop corner” in a kindergarten classroom has been transformed from an unattractive, unworkable space to a highly functioning, inviting learning space. All because the teacher handed over the problem to the students who designed (see drawings in previous post) , constructed and formulated a new layout with workable routines for the shop corner.

The students in kinder knew what they wanted the shop corner to look like and how they wanted it to work. They bought an incredible amount of knowledge this process – far more than the teacher anticipated!

When I visited the room, the students were quick to explain how they transformed the learning space – without any prompting from me! It became obvious they had changed the shop into a cafe – a very familiar scenario for these children as their local area is famous for it’s cafe culture!!

Ryan demonstrated how he made the “juicer” for the shop by taking me through the design of the juicer, step by step. What a sophisticated process of problem-solving!! When I asked him where he got his ideas from, he told me is family had a juicer at home. In terms of constructing the juicer at school, his commented….

It was quite hard actually!

The children also came up with other ideas for the space:

1. Making curtains out of clear cellophane to make the cafe more inviting

2. Creating a “job roster” on a whiteboard so that they could all take turns in taking on a role e.g. a waitress

3. Designing and writing menus for their cafe

4. Constructing a clock – all shops have a clock!!!!

5. One of the children had the clever idea of making a traffic light sign to indicate “Closed” (red), “Getting ready to close” (amber) and “Open” (green). To them this was more interesting then a conventional Open/Closed sign. Brilliant!

6. Designed and painted placemats for the table – just like in a cafe!

All of these tasks undertaken by the students involved researching, predicting, investigating, problem-solving, decision-making, negotiating, hypothesizing and justifying.

They chose to represent their understandings in multiple ways – through labelled drawings, construction, painting, signs, writing (menus, lists, calenders, labels, signs..) and role play. Above all, this learning was purposeful, was based on a familiar experience (so they could all bring a lot of knowledge to the task) and was highly motivating as they were making decisions about their learning.

This teacher knows that through this learning process, her students are well on the way towards achieving a range of ES1 outcomes. And not one worksheet was needed!!

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A kindergarten conversation

I had a great discussion today with Linda, the Kindergarten teacher at Haberfield. She had many questions about the possibilities of changing her current pedagogy to align it more closely with the principles of early learning.

We discussed what was currently working well. This is important as often the very structure or organisation of successful learning can be transferred to new contexts. Linda explained how pleased she was with the taskboard for reading. The children were independent, could work successfully in groups and most importantly they were familiar with the open-ended nature of the tasks. So my question was “How could you transfer this to another learning context or KLA?”

Here are some ideas we touched on.

• Using a similar taskboard scenario for the HSIE unit of Recycling whereby the children can participate in writing, construction, reading, listening post, computer tasks (as they do in reading) but linking the tasks to Recycling theme
• Within the Environment unit for Science & Tech, allowing the children’s questions, for instance, “What do you want to find out about…..?” to drive the learning tasks
• Establishing learning centres for handwriting whereby the students participate in a variety of different

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  
  
  learning tasks to develop their fine motor skills e.g. using different media (paintbrushes in water; chalk on bitumen; crayons on large paper; shaving cream on trays; sand boxes) to practice different letter shapes and patterns.
• Getting the children to redesign the Shop Learning Centre and encouraging them to investiagte different ways to operate the Shop so that all children can learn and participate

Linda is very keen to get started and in fact, had already begun investigating possibilities. What makes a difference during this process is having the opportunity to engage in professional dialogue to tease out ideas, ask questions and process understandings. COLLABORATION IS THE KEY.

Some time later…….

Wow! Linda asked the children in her class to design the Shop corner to improve how it could be used. The children came up with some amazing designs that clearly demonstrated their problem-solving and thinking skills. Brilliant!! When talking to Linda about this learning task, she commented that the children were deeply engaged in composing their diagrams for quite a long time. She particularly noted the children who didn’t usually engage with writing, and how different they were with this task. Some of the best ideas came from the the most reluctant writers! So what’s this telling us about the types of learning tasks we offer students?

The next step for Linda is to decide how to involve the children in taking their ideas forward to actually re-create the Shop Corner.

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