Planned and purposeful talk

COLLAPSEWhat aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire? 

What aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire?

In early years children should be provided with ample opportunities to orally communicate with each other. We can’t expect the children to use proper tone of voice or different gestures and body language, if we don’t explicitly teach and introduce them to these social conventions. In North American culture maintaining eye contact is consider important, while in some cultures like in South-East Asia direct eye contact with your adults while talking to them is considered disrespectful. Therefore, teaching the acceptable behaviour of our society is important and teaching them in early years will help them learn the norm from the beginning.

As early years educators, we should expose our students to these skills by carefully planning the program that allows the children to explore language and to communicate their thinking and learning in meaningful ways. Educators should listen to their students attentively and observe children’s responses and interactions. They can guide oral language development by providing models of richer responses to guide children’s thinking, and by introducing new vocabulary, by using different tone of voice while reading aloud and modeling during play-based learning time in centres like dramatic play. All these modeling and exposure will help build the foundation needed to develop oral language skills in early years.

Think-Pair-Share

We use think-pair-share in our classroom, however we call it Elbow Partner Talk. I believe this is a great strategy to support oral language because students take turns to both be a speaker and a listener. We ask our students to close their eyes and think about what they are going to say to themselves first, after 30 seconds we ask them to turn to their elbow partner and talk. They take turns to share their ideas and thinking after more or less a minute or so, we start counting down from five to zero, this is the warning for students to finish their sentence and turn and face the teacher. Almost all the time whenever we’ve used this strategy we have most of our students put up their hands to share their thinking and ideas. This strategy gives them a chance to express their thinking and listen to someone else’s thinking before they can share to the whole class. It’s less stressing to say something that’s on your mind to one person than to speak in front of the whole class. I believe that this strategy helps build up students confidence to speak in front of large crowd.

Self Regulatiion

Self-Regulation

COLLAPSE

J.P. is touching anchor chart on the wall, S.S. is playing with his shoes, K.W. is looking around, while M.D. is trying to explain how he can make shadows big and small during our Learning Circle. Why can’t these kids focus and listen to what M.D. is eagerly trying to share? 

This kind of questions used to bother me until I read and saw the videos on Self-regulation. Some of my students are not able to regulate their behaviour nor are they aware of or able to respond to the feelings of others. Dr. Shankar would argue that these kids are not “able to adjust their body and mind to attain and maintain the optimal state of arousal for a task or situation.”

When I think about it now, I feel I have more work to do to learn the reasons behind my student’s behaviour. Instead of labeling them as hyperactive, I should find out why they behave the way they do. Why are they anxious and what are those triggers? The other thing I can do is to rethink my Learning Circle and sharing time. Is it important for me to have all the students on the carpet or this sharing can be done in small groups and with the kids who really want to learn about the topic. My goal should be to make all the students feel successful at the end of the day and by adjusting and rethinking my practices, I think I should be able to help my students self-regulate and be successful. 

Say no to worksheets

I'm taking Kindergarten AQ course and I've learned a lot from the resources and discussions that we are engaged in. One of our topics was "The worksheets dilemma". Here is what I learned and think...

- Worksheets are teacher centered not child centered – The kindergarten classrooms should be child centered and not teacher centered. Worksheets only satisfy the urge that teachers have to have a tangible assessment so he/she can share with the parents.

- Worksheets always have one right answer – In the play-based and inquiry-based classrooms there are many ways to get to an answer. Each child thinks differently and will come up with different solution. Therefore, giving them a worksheet does not fulfill this kind of program.

- Worksheets are not differentiated – In order to reach every child in our classrooms; we thrive for differentiating for our students and provide scaffolding to help them move forward. Whereas, worksheets have the same content for each and every student and does not help to meet the needs of ALL the students.

- Products vs. Process – Play-based and Inquiry-based programs are geared towards process of learning and worksheets are all about the final product. In the play/inquiry-based program process is important and it helps enter these plays and inquiries at students readiness and interest levels.

- Worksheets are not developmentally appropriate – Worksheets tells us what a child knows at the given point it does not gives us a whole picture. In doing so it takes away opportunities for oral communication, their imagination and creativity, problem-solving skills, collaboration, and the use of their senses.