The third teacher in action

The classroom environment, or the third teacher, can provide opportunities for us to find out what a child knows or can do.

One of our learning outcomes is for children to use ordinal numbers.

Today, C. was looking at the hour glass which is made up of one minute,two minute and five minutes. He talked about how the last one, 5 minutes, had the most sand because it took the longest. He told me which one would be first. We talked about which one would be second.

On his way out of the classroom he noticed that his bag hook is "second" in the row.

He is able to use ordinal numbers. The third teacher has provided the opportunity for me to find out what C. knows about ordinal numbers.

Comments

Fascinating Sunflower Sprouts

When planting sunflower seeds, one of the children wanted to do it on his own. He got a white plastic bottle from the recyclables shelf, added some dirt, a couple of sunflower seeds, water and took it outside to put it in the sun. Such independence. Such initiative. It was fascinating to see that different children were interested in different aspects of the process.

Tape Man

Some of the children put blue tape over their mouth. Usually I would have said something like, "Take the tape off your mouth. It's not for putting on your mouth." Instead I thought of Tape Man (with some pride, being from New Zealand). I thought of creativity. I thought of art. So we sat together for whole group time, some with tape on their mouth. I said, "I've got something to show you." When they first say him one of them said, "It's scary." I reassured them that it's not too scary and that he's being funny. So they started to laugh. Pretty soon there was no more tape on mouths (not that I minded if there was, it's just hard to laugh). Thank you Tape Man for reminding us that creativity begins with exploration in play.

NZ Teacher

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