NZ Teacher

There is a calendar in my room. It hangs like a regular calendar in a house.  The calendar has the children's birthdays marked on it.   We write on any special events or something we want to remember to do tomorrow. J ust like we do at home.   We don't talk about the calendar as a class, it's more on an individual basis as children become interested in it or ask, "Is this my birthday?" when they see their name on their birthday month.

For now, I have a plan of the year. I have a list of every week of the year with the social-emotional curriculum focus, the books I'd like to read during the week, the songs and rhymes that I plan to introduce, the math activity, what I'll do for literacy, for cooking, for craft, the handwriting focus and what I plan to put into the sensory tray. I consider it a draft plan or a list of ideas which I can pick and choose from as the year goes by. I do not stick with the plan but I use it as a list of possibilities. Maybe the books will change, depending on the interests of the children. Maybe they show no interest in one of the books so it won't stand a repeated reading.  Maybe someone will start to talk sing one of the songs I have listed for later in the year. We'd sing it then, no need to wait.  The math activity is based on a sequence of objectives from the engageny curriculum. We use engageny as a resource, not a program that we follow. We use their outcom...

Small group teaching means that I can get to know each child as an individual. It means that I can teach each child at their point of need. I have used ability grouping before, for reading and math. Currently I don't. Why? The biggest reason is that the children learn from each other. Another reason is that the activity we do in a small group is open enough for each child to do it at their own level. An important reason is that I haven't been teaching reading. That's something I think I would teach in an ability or interest group. There may be a time I ability group in the future but for now, it's mixed ability.

When I first started teaching children 3-4 years old,  I mostly did whole class teaching. I knew better but it's funny how, in times of stress or faced with a new challenge, we regress - we go back to the old ways. That's what I did.  The plan in the picture shows what I would do with the class over the course of the week. The parents wanted to know that we weren't just playing. One of the parents had complained that she saw her daughter playing in the classroom which is what she could have been doing at home (that's a blog post for another time). Whole class teaching was hard! Even with 2 assistants and 21 kids. The kids needed help with the lid of the glue, or to get the stick cotton wool off their fingers.  For cooking, I split the class into 2 groups. Half would stay in the classroom with the assistants while the other half went to the kitchen with me. But 10 kids is a lot to cook with. Since then I've grouped the class into four groups of 5 or 6 in eac...

Bev Bos coined this phrase: The child is the curriculum. That really defines child-centered teaching & learning. We learn so much about our children when we interact with them and let them choose what they want to do in the classroom.  I like to define "curriculum" as 'everything that happens in the classroom'.  "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation"  - Plato  from   http://www.playcounts.com/

Curriculum  is the work of teachers.   We need to know what to teach & what to look for in our children’s learning. Teachers know the curriculum. Children know how to play. Play is the work of children – play is how they learn. Curriculum is the work of teachers. What if there was no curriculum? BTW: This was my classroom in 2014. Since then I have learned that too much clutter is distracting for the children. 

The children are always surprising us by doing something unexpected with the materials in the classroom. Who would have thought to make the letter P with the recycled drink bottles and toilet paper rolls? Who would have thought to make shapes with the marker pens?  Learning happens in a classroom where different objects are available for the children to use in a creative way.