Moving outdoors in term 4
Term 4 - Inquiry focus.
As is the case with teaching in the New Entrant space the cohort of students can vary markedly from term to term, and week to week. This term brought 6 wonderful new learners into our classroom.
These new arrivals bring strengths, knowledges and some challenges with them. They must learn the way of doing things within our classroom, get to know their classmates, navigate an unfamiliar environment and spend many hours away from the safety of kainga and whanau.
Play-based learning provides a way for students to learn about each other and build relationships with classmates and teachers in a manner which is natural to them. Play allows them to express their personality, collaborate, and use their personal agency.
My focus for the play-based learning sessions this term will be to extend the play opportunities to include outdoor activities. Using the outdoors allows them more physical space as we grow in number and is especially positive for those children who enjoy free movement.
This will include making use of the playhouse for role playing, by installing the kitchen and play furniture into the space.
The sandpit will be free to be used as a sensory play option. Unstructured opportunities for creative play will be fostered by providing large boxes.
The learners will be able to move freely from activity to activity and teachers will be on hand to engage the learners in discussions of their play, motivations and foster oral language extension. Each teacher will have an ipad to record these interactions which will then be shared to the class.
These recordings can then be blogged on the class site and used to provide a transcript of the children's learning for written language lessons later that day.
As is the case with teaching in the New Entrant space the cohort of students can vary markedly from term to term, and week to week. This term brought 6 wonderful new learners into our classroom.
These new arrivals bring strengths, knowledges and some challenges with them. They must learn the way of doing things within our classroom, get to know their classmates, navigate an unfamiliar environment and spend many hours away from the safety of kainga and whanau.
Play-based learning provides a way for students to learn about each other and build relationships with classmates and teachers in a manner which is natural to them. Play allows them to express their personality, collaborate, and use their personal agency.
My focus for the play-based learning sessions this term will be to extend the play opportunities to include outdoor activities. Using the outdoors allows them more physical space as we grow in number and is especially positive for those children who enjoy free movement.
This will include making use of the playhouse for role playing, by installing the kitchen and play furniture into the space.
The sandpit will be free to be used as a sensory play option. Unstructured opportunities for creative play will be fostered by providing large boxes.
The learners will be able to move freely from activity to activity and teachers will be on hand to engage the learners in discussions of their play, motivations and foster oral language extension. Each teacher will have an ipad to record these interactions which will then be shared to the class.
These recordings can then be blogged on the class site and used to provide a transcript of the children's learning for written language lessons later that day.
This sounds awesome. How did it work out? I would love to read a follow up post.
ReplyDeleteDorothy