Matching Reading Capability with Emotional Maturity

This blog post offers my suggestions to teachers or parents with a child whose reading capability and thirst for books is often a little out of line with the subject matter of books aimed at their age group. The children to whom I am referring are aged between five and eight and are competent, independent readers. While these children really want to lose themselves in a meaty, wordy text, they do not want to run into content above their maturity level.

Boys can Sew Too!

 

Having ignited a passion for needlework in my son (see my blog post, Real Tools and Materials December, 2018) it is wonderful to see him continue to explore different textile arts as he grows older. Now he’s gained mastery over a number of media, he’s able to let his creativity fly and realise his designs with minimal support.

Sadly, very few boys are given the opportunity or encouraged to explore crafts such as sewing and knitting so miss out on this creative avenue. Most needlework kits are marketed towards girls, with the usual predominance of pink or sparkly motifs and packaging. There are very few learn-to-sew or learn-to-knit books for kids which are gender-neutral and certainly almost none aimed at boys. Even a trawl through Pinterest or a general Google search brings up very little on this subject.

The Allure of Playing Cards

Some of my warmest childhood memories are of playing cards with friends and family; evenings devoted to lengthy game sessions or wet camping holidays rescued by the familiar yet slightly mysterious faces of the fifty-two cardboard rectangles. The longstanding favourite game in our family is Racing Demon, a high-speed, adrenalin-inducing strategy game which gets all the  more demonic the more players that join in. Strangely, I've never met anyone outside of our family who knows this fantastic game, but maybe others call by a different name.

The Mud Racetrack - A Loose Parts Playground Story

The universal appeal of mud was demonstrated within the first few hours of setting up our loose parts playground and opening up the garden space; children got stuck in straightaway, making trenches, digging holes, bashing in posts and, once our mud kitchen was established, making all manner of muddy culinary delights. And the enthusiasm certainly hasn’t waned. Every lunch and break time the ‘loose parts garden’, as it is now termed, buzzes with activity as children across the grade levels happily play together. One of the observable wonders is how their play evolves over time and projects take new shapes and directions.

One such project is 'The Mud Racetrack' which has developed from a digging a simple hole to carving out ‘irrigation’ trenches to creating a complex raised racetrack for remote control cars. There are so many aspects to this project which are fantastic - the teamwork of the large group involved, the ingenuity and authentic problem-solving and the perseverance. But is the raw enthusiasm and joy which makes me so incredibly happy, as this was exactly the kind of project I’d hoped to see come about when initiating the loose parts playground.

Using Ed Tech

One of my goals this year was to provide my students with more opportunities for effective technology use. I have found that referral to the SAMR model and the International Baccalaureate’s Approaches to Learning skills (ATLs) have helped to support my planning and to hone in on transferable skills.

Building a Learning Community: Involving Parents

With the heightened emphasis on the learning community in the International Baccalaureate's Enhanced PYP, we have been aiming to reach out to parents in various different ways at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad, India. Adding to other long-standing engagements such as parent involvement in school events, participation as guest speakers and taking feedback through surveys and questionnaires, we have explored bringing parents on-board in some new ways of late. These include learning alongside their children, sharing their perspectives on our curriculum and contributing to our resource bank through item donation.

Snapshots of Play

Photo Credit: Mita Mohanty

In August of this year we launched our play initiative in the Junior School, building upon some earlier moves in this direction the previous academic year. Three months in, we can see some tangible successes. Dedicating the last lesson of the day to play - a time for curriculum outcomes to be explored explicitly through playful approaches - and also re-envisioning our lunchtime play has really made a difference.

Supporting Learners in Becoming Independent

Observing my own teaching approach develop over the years, I have seen myself move from fast-paced, highly structured lessons, packed with varied teacher-led learning engagements to slower, freer lessons in which students explore ideas at their individual pace, continually reflect on their learning and find which approaches to learning best suit themselves. I’m still on a journey with this but I think I’m gaining a much better understanding of how better to support my students to be successful, independent, learners.

Nature Tables

Bringing nature into our home is something which my son and I have always enjoyed and we take great pleasure in showing off our finds on a permanent nature table. Creating a designated area like this puts value on his curiosity and love of nature, on his choices as regards what and how things could be presented, plus it puts value on the items themselves.

Developing A Vision for Play Time

INSET Day of Outdoor Fun Begins

At the tail end of the last academic year I simultaneously launched the Loose Parts Playground and claimed and opened a large garden space for the Junior School. Both were an instant hit with the students. Along with many discussions and mini workshops on play last year, and the set-up of our maker space, we had begun, as a staff, to re-think our approach to play time.This August’s INSET provided me with the platform to share my vision of how we can really take play to the next level. 

Sedentary Activity Trends in Preschool Children

Of late, I have been reading a large amount of literature on the importance of play, outdoor learning and physical activity levels of children, but the findings referenced in the 2012 research study by Copeland, K. et al really made me stop and think hard: “Children spend most (70%–83%) of their time being sedentary in child care—even when excluding time spent in naps and meals—and only spend 2% to 3% of the time in vigorous activities”. What irreparable damage are we doing to our young children, setting up such patterns of behaviour for their lives ahead?

30 Reasons Why Free Play Benefits Child Development - Infographic from AAA State of Play

A great info-graphic by this commercial playground equipment company. You can see it clearer here: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/30-reasons-why-free-play-benefits-child-development/

Equality for All

In this era of narrow-mindedness and fear-mongering, it is all the more important that educational establishments take on the responsibility of challenging the status quo and opening young minds to different versions of the same story.  I felt that our Junior School did just that this term by inviting a transgender woman in to speak to our students.  This may not seem such a big deal to some readers, but our school is situated in India, a country in which transgender people live almost exclusively on the margins of society and are frequently the subjects of abuse, discrimination and atrocities.

No Chair Day

Browsing through the website of The Early Years Alliance, I came upon a piece by UK-based music and movement specialist, Helen Batteley (https://www.eyalliance.org.uk/music-and-movement-encouraging-physical-activity). She was advocating for ‘No Chair Day’, an initiative to provoke teachers to think about the importance of physical activity for children and about alternatives to sitting in classrooms. The simplicity of the campaign appealed to me and I floated the idea to the Junior School staff. To my great pleasure, many took up the challenge, pitching the idea to their students and brainstorming ways learning could be re-designed without the need for sitting.

Creation of a Children's Garden

I'd had my eye on a particular patch of greenery for quite some time and had been observing it through the seasonal changes to gauge its potential as a children’s garden. It sits at the end of the Junior School corridor but the puzzling fact that it was surrounded by a thick hedge meant that we couldn’t access it. A number of reasons why we couldn’t use it had been given, but only ever anecdotally and none of the reasons seemed insurmountable. So I designed a proposal as a part of an outdoor learning and play spaces revamp, got the go-ahead and, one fine day, a entrance way cut appeared in the hedge and we were allowed in!

Joining in with Global School Play Day

(https://www.facebook.com/globalschoolplayday/)

One of our new focus areas in our Junior School is that of play so I was really keen for us to take part in Global School Play Day this year. Each class from Grades 1-5 were involved, incorporating play into the school day in the form of free play and more teacher-led activities. 

This wonderful grassroots celebration of play really aims for children to be engaged in purely unstructured activities as this is increasingly stolen from them in our race for them to be achieving and busy the whole time. I took this as an opportunity to also encourage our teachers to come up with ways they could design play-based learning engagements during the day in addition to the free play. It was also another invitation for more movement-based and outdoor activities. 

Of course, the children had a really fun day, and the teachers also enjoyed the challenge too!

Loose Parts Playground Launch

This week sees the launch of our ‘loose parts playground’! I’ve been working on a re-vamp of our outdoor spaces with a focus on re-directing the way we play and learn in them. One initiative I have been keen to bring in is the concept of providing children with outdoor play items which will provoke creativity, new ways of using the body, teamwork and communication. These items will supplement the existing fixed-to-the-ground playground equipment pieces and will consist of collections of random items which children can use to build structures of their own choosing. Logs, planks of wood, tree branches, tyres and fabrics are just some of the things we are including in our loose parts playground.

An Enlightening Visit

For a teacher, a visit to another school always brings in fresh ideas and perspectives. This week I was privileged to visit a very special school indeed, a Waldorf school in Hyderabad, India. It is one of those schools where, as soon as you enter, you are aware of a tangible atmosphere or energy and, by the end of the visit, you feel slightly changed in some way. This school radiated a distinct feeling of calm and happiness and both the children and the staff welcomed us with smiles and openness.

Real Tools and Materials

Being the daughter of two exceptionally skilled craftsmen (jewellers, to be precise) I might have also developed fantastic artistic skills but, sadly, these largely passed me by. However, I did develop a deep appreciation for the value of craftsmanship and design along with transferable attributes of creativity, perseverance and attention to detail. Now, as a mother of young child and educator I am all the more cognisant of the multiple values of handwork and exploration of diverse materials. Two skill areas I have been particularly keen to explore with my own child are sewing and woodwork, both of which he is really hooked on. Dexterity, focus, muscle strength, perseverance, problem-solving, joy... just some of the many benefits I can see have been developed in him. 

Changing Teacher and Student Roles

Two texts I’ve been reading recently have led me to reflect on a thorny issue within teaching and learning - the gap between what the teacher intends for students to learn and the learning that actually takes place. The studies I’ve been reading are The Hidden Lives of Learners by Graham Nuttall, published posthumously in 2007, and the fascinating study of reading, Inquiry into Meaning: An Investigation of Learning to Read (2001) revised ed. by Bussis, Chittenden & Sallinger.

Nuttall’s research tracked students in classrooms through hours of detailed data gathering involving audio/video recordings, anecdotal records, observation, and interviews. The findings showed that what was typically learnt from a lesson varied considerably from student to student and in most cases was indeed not at all what the teacher had planned for them to learn. Reasons given were various - insufficient knowledge of students’ prior knowledge, lack of student motivation and students retaining little from the planned engagement.

Reading this, I connected with the theories of Kelly (1955), used by Bussis et al. as a framework for their study of reading. Kelly proposed that an individual’s personal constructs dictate the way he/she perceives information. Here is an explanation from the first edition of the book by Bussis et al quoted in the revised edition:

...two people exposed to the same events may construe them in very different ways and come away from the same situation with two quite disparate sets of learning and experience. Likewise, individuals may construe different events in much the same way and thereby share similar meanings and exhibit similar behaviours. It is similarity in the construing of events that provides the basis for similar perceptions and actions, and not similarity or sameness in the events themselves. (Bussis et al., 1985, p. 15)