September 22-25

Exploring Our Outdoor Campus

We extended our exploration of ourselves and each other to include our outdoor school environment. Since this is the first year of school, we needed to see what was out there on our campus! We began on our porch and looped around the entire school. As we walked the children pointed out what they saw and asked questions about what they were not familiar with. We asked them to identify what they were seeing as well, which made it an engaging and exciting conversation! 

The next day we revisited the experience by looking at the pictures. For this revisiting experience we viewed the pictures on the table and described what we saw and experienced. Then we went through each one and as the children described the picture we chose the appropriate word to label it. As the word was said out loud the writing of it under the picture was modeled for the children. This action shows the children that the words they say can be written down and then read back. Each picture cue sparked a memory, explanation or label from the children, and they expanded on their descriptions as they viewed them. This oral language experience was guided completely by the children, which made it relevant and important to them. 

What evolved was a preschool version of The Language Experience Approach. We do this often in preschool because it is so natural and so valuable to the children's language and literacy development. This literacy approach is where a teacher and students:  

• Have an experience together

• Discuss that experience using visuals

• Write about the experience

In preschool the writing is the teacher labeling the images in the pictures as the students orally identify them. Teachers also write down some of the descriptions in the children's words. Next we will revisit our adventure again and see how much the children remember and can describe. They will then match the labels to the pictures, trace the labeled words and "read" the labels out loud together. 

The next day we matched the highlighted written labels to the printed pictures with the written label. We used this as an opportunity to trace the words to add a little writing practice to the experience. The children were very proud of their writing work and even began "writing" their own words and letters in strips of paper when they finished their traced word. Their excitement for writing and pride in their work was fantastic to witness!

Some information about the LEA:

Early language learners benefit from rich tasks that provide them with ample opportunities to hear, see, use and manipulate language in contextualised, purposeful ways. In the traditional Language Experience Approach (LEA) teachers use a shared experience - often involving photographs/images of that experience - as a prompt to collectively write a text with the learners. This text - often a series of photographs/images with captions - becomes a text that the group reads, re-reads, revises and extends. The language experience approach (LEA) is a whole language approach that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language. It effectively helps develop learners' print awareness, since learners see the direct connection between images and words. It effectively connects known vocabulary and new vocabulary with print words, since the experience and image(s) correlate with words in the written caption(s).