After being involved in the 2016 Pilot of the ‘Age Appropriate Pedagogies’ Project, our Prep classes and Year 1 classes are now engaged in using age appropriate pedagogies to support our children to be actively engaged, creative and successful learners. It was wonderful to watch Mrs O’Connor today with her Prep classes and to consider the range of activities that had been planned for them in view of these key goals for learning in our junior years at Oakleigh State School.
I sat and watched several groups of children playing with this storytelling set for the Three Billy Goat’s Gruff (see image below). The Australian National Curriculum, providing us with the ‘what’ stipulates in the Year Level Description that children should:
engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read and view spoken, written and multimodal texts in which the primary purpose is to entertain, as well as some texts designed to inform. These include traditional oral texts, picture books, various types of stories, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts and dramatic performances. They participate in shared reading, viewing and storytelling using a range of literary texts, and recognise the entertaining nature of literature. ACARA- English – Foundation Year.
This term, the children focus on retelling a familiar story in their classroom learning and Mrs O’Connor has been supporting this work by building up knowledge and experiences whilst focussing on the ‘Three Billy Goat’s Gruff’. This activity below, one of 4 during their 40 minute Library rotation, allowed the children to work in groups to use the puppets to retell this story. The children loved this activity and were dramatic and enthusiastic in their efforts.
Another group were working on their retelling of the Three Billy Goat’s Gruff with an app called ‘Explain Everything’. The use of screen recording in this app is one of the most powerful ways I have come across enable the ‘making of thinking visible’ as it allows the user to create things on screen and to then articulate their thoughts whilst having both of these modes of communication recorded. So, the children are able to create the setting of the story and then to move their characters around as puppets whist they tell the story. They can stop and gather their thoughts at any time, rewind to listen to their story thus far or share the recording duties between group members. At the end, they have an exquisite movie of their story which then assists them and others to reinforce the order of events. As teachers, we aim to use technology to enable experiences that would not be otherwise possible and this is a clear example of such work.
These boys were in another group involved in building the set of the story with blocks and then retelling. This activity was lovely in that it appealed to those in the group with a clear leaning towards active play.
Another group was doing some basic literacy and numeracy work on the laptops – using mice, keyboards and key onscreen actions to achieve some basic tasks.
Mrs O’Connor then was activity involved with yet another group who were focussed on some computational thinking. As a school implementing the Digital Technologies Curriculum, we are working with our youngest learners to seize the opportunities of this curriculum to enhance problem solving, logical thinking and creative and critical thinking. The Digital Technologies Curriculum does not mention the term ‘coding’ but does instead, focus on the types of thinking that allow us to break down problems, remove unnecessary details, think systematically and then to think in creative ways to solve problems and solutions. This is where the power of this curriculum lies and not in any attempt to teach child to code or program.
Mrs O’Connor was working with the children to assist them to think in logical, sequential steps, whilst creating a path for a successful maze completion. They initially used a new floor game to be able to move their own bodies through a physical maze, discussing the steps they needed to take and using the appropriate language. They then moved to their little individual whiteboards to represent their actions with an algorithm. This involved problem-solving, logical thinking, risk-taking and collaboration.
