How do you know when your learners are curriculum ready?
A good chunk of the curriculum is the key competencies - it’s not just the core learning areas.
What do you do to prepare them?
How do you monitor their progress?
Activity: Cut, paste, write with the non-dominant hand
A layer of stress - so many instructions to remember.
What did we notice:
Poor fine motor skills
No hand dominance - moving
No helper hand - moving (often children at 4.9 don’t know to use both hands)
Visual discrimination - looking
Following three instructions - hearing (working memory)
Our brain is having to think - pencil grip, sitting upright (body unconsciously thinking about all this) Brain is in cognitive overload - things fall off - can’t remember everything - tires & stresses our learners.
What are the key foundation skills that children need? How do we make them automatic?
‘Learning readiness’ involves knowing a child’s level of neurodevelopment & whether their various sensory-motor systems such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, balance & sense of body in space are functioning well enough to support learning.
What have they got already? What underpinning foundation skills are missing?
School ready vs curriculum ready - what’s the difference?
What happens if we push formal reading/writing & they’re not ready?
Developmental theorists -
Why do children need these skills?
Develope the framework as a response to these needs - what does play-based look like and how can it be strengthened? - not a free "go for i." We do not what to be reinforcing the wrong behaviours and do not want to be too extreme with swapping rotations and times etc. Designing your provocations etc meet the needs of what the students need (fine motor - gluesticks reinforce palmer grip, vs paste).
Developmentally not ready - not toilet trained, cannot do up their bags/dress, oral language
Foundation skills children need to have to successfully access the curriculum: (The chart shows things children at 4.9 years of ages should be able to do):
Speaking
Seeing
Moving
Hearing
All underpinned by Key Competencies
What does the research say?
Developmental readiness - Nathan Wallis
Learning through play - Longworth
Carol Dweck - Growth Mindset research
The language we use - get rid of good girl language. “I got it right so I am good.:
Know your learner,
Switched off - too hard or too easy.
Teacher believes in them.
What are we, as teachers, doing to engage them? What makes them tick? What have they got?
Not having Key Competencies stops learners from moving forward & prevents learning from other students around them.
Teachers need deliberate acts of teaching KCs.
4 Major Skills for MOVING: What are the skills & why are they are important
Fine motor skills - how can we develop these? How can children & their families take some responsibility too (add to goal setting) Develop pencil grip - maybe 6 opportunities a day to work on the grip. Using tweezers to pick things up. Writing on a vertical blackboard
Gross motor skills- core development (sitting up) - what do we do for the kids that don’t have a strong core.
Crossing the midline - Skipping, connecting left & right brain. Brain gym activities.
Balance -
Heel/toe on the lines to the library - put these extra things into your day.
What ones can the kids do? Which ones are going to matter?
Talk about helper hand - do this deliberately.
We can put these things into place in our ‘Learning Through Play’ classrooms.
Some will be provocations
Others will be deliberate acts of teaching for some children
Hearing:
4 major ones.
Listen - Q and A responding to language.
Interpret information/understanding -working memory.
Rhyme - rhythm,
Individual sound/syllables,
John Hartmann - youtube
Brain breaks - syllables etc
Speaking:
Speaking in full sentences.
Verbalizing things.
Gifting vocabulary.
Appropriate language and endings.
Seeing:
The difference in colour - are we asking the right questions as well as the difference in size.
Print:
Print rich environments - modelling and using print.
Key competencies:
DAT in this area
Observing
Assessing
Assessment:
Looking and observing how your students follow instructions etc.
"Can you go and get me" … (three things), then record who copies others, who retains all of the instructions etc.
Be careful you use the language they understand.
