Teaching and Curriculum in Practice
Teaching and Curriculum in Practice
Over the 10 weeks of placement, I believed I had brought for the children a lot of different experiences, including for their physical, cognitive, language, social and emotional learning development. As my approach it proved that my belief in play-based learning that would bring children a better outcome and the children would enjoy the learning more than traditional learning style (AGDE, 2022), also that my approach was mostly child-led as I believed in Piaget’s theory that children should be the controller of their learning and development (Mcleod, 2023e). Moreover, as an early childhood educator, my practices was also adapted from Vygotsky’s theory which I saw myself as the more knowledgeable person to scaffold and enhance my children for their further developments and learnings (Mcleod, 2023a). Furthermore, thanks to the “No News Day” on Wednesday which was part of the centre’s practices, I was able to spend more quality and meaningful time with the children in midweek and really enjoyed in the free play with them, to establish a stronger relationship with the children, and also to observer for their interests and scaffold for their next learning, and I believed that children at this age (0-2), they required extra attention and trusting relationship in the learning environment in order to feel safe and secured which was mentioned in Erikson’s theory – trust and mistrust (Mcleod, 2023b).
The documentation, assessment and planning records were adapted with the centre’s learning records requirements and format, it included the context of the experience, following by what happened during the activity (body), educator then analysed of children’s learning and development depending on educator’ teaching practices and belief, and I mostly applied Vygotsky’s theory while writing an observation for children learning which I saw myself as the more knowledgeable person to scaffold and enhance my children for their further developments and learnings (Mcleod, 2023a). The observation ended with learning outcomes that children achieved in the learning experience and also the following up experience.
This section contains a total of 2 pedagogical documentation including colour recognition learning (child interest/child-led) and name recognition (educator scaffolded and lead). The colour learning journey lasted for about 4 weeks and name recognition learning lasted for 2 weeks. The purposes for doing all these experiences in both pedagogical documents has been explained in personal weekly critical reflection and in this section will only demonstrate children’s learning process in both learning journey, including photographs (with children’s face blur out) and daily learning journal.