Embedded Files
Observation & Documentation
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Interpreting Thinking
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Planning
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Facilitating Play
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Reflective Evaluation
Set Up & Facilitate Play
Set Up & Facilitate Play
Teachers can enter the COI at two points on the cycle- either begin with observation, or skip to setting up a provocation and facilitating play as a starting point for inspiration.
*Provocation idea: Claire Warden's Talking and Thinking Tub: Display a variety of materials that have to do with a broader topic and document what the children notice and ask. This gives you information on what they are interested in and where they are at developmentally on this particular topic. Click here to view her Scotland Tub example.
Setting Up Play
Learning Centers
An overall goal of arranging the environment for emergent inquiry curriculum is to organize learning spaces where children can be protagonists, independently developing relationships with people and using materials to translate their thinking and responses into many different languages, or ways of understanding and expressing their thinking about the world.
Start by planning for learning centers organized around content that is typically identified as developmentally appropriate—that is, it promotes children’s learning through practices that build on children’s strengths and are appropriate to each child’s culture, language, and abilities.
To support children's learningin many developmental domains, these centers might include:
Dramatic play center
Literacy center
Math or Manipulatives center
Sensory center perhaps with a focus on science
Block center
Quiet center
Art center
Aesthetics
Children are inspired by beauty and order. Practice working with the concept of aesthetics in your classroom by focusing on your use of visual cues and the organization of materials in the learning centers. Try to set up in a way that allows children to do more and you as the teacher to do less, and record documentation of the setup as well in addition to the children engaged in play.
Include a bouquet of flowers where children paint with watercolors
Minimize clutter
Choose fewer open-ended materials to put on shelves children access
Aim to lessen the time children are waiting as you set up experiences or activities in the classroom
Open Ended and Flexible Materials
Open-ended materials have the ability to transform from one purpose to another. A block can become a telephone, a vehicle, or a house. While open-ended materials challenge children to explore in diverse ways and to represent their thinking independently or in collaboration with peers, the ways a teacher intentionally sets up the materials can influence the types of thinking that might be explored.
When adding materials that can scaffold and extend to what children are interested in, decide whether to explicitly introduce materials or not. There is a full range from discovering things that were put out, to mentioning it, to actual instructing if it's something that's more complicated to use.
Facilitating Play
Threads of inquiry
The pathways for learning that children follow with the careful facilitation of intentional teachers (under the bigger idea).
A Big Idea
A core framework that links together several emerging threads of inquiry.
Informal Classroom Meetings (Circle Time)
Informal classroom meetings refer to those in which teachers gather children to focus on social topics like classroom rules, communication, and the solving of social conflicts and other problems and to experience social rituals such as singing and movement, reading books, and finger-plays. Additionally, teachers may ask children to share the things they noticed that are new in the classroom that day. Informal classroom meetings are typically brief and meant to support the organization of the day.
Focused Classroom Meetings (Can be the end of day regroup)
Emergent inquiry teachers plan for a few focused classroom meetings each week—sometimes with the whole group and sometimes with just a few children—centered on problems and questions aligned with threads of inquiry embedded in the children’s constructive play experiences. Through careful planning, teachers can intentionally help children to meta-reflect—that is, reflect on their own thinking about their interests, their questions and curiosities, and the ways they see the world—by engaging in experiences and dialogue with peers.
When you organize focused classroom meetings, you are providing opportunities for the small core inquiry group to introduce their experiences and ideas to the whole group, sharing to solidify their understanding of the content and processes and to get new ideas from peers. This also allows you to guide the core group in posing problems they are facing to their peers to ask for help in finding solutions. Sharing their processes with the whole class exposes new children to the cognitively rich experiences that are occurring across the classroom, which may inspire new players to enter into the inquiry periodically or long-term.
Other Nature-Based Ideas for Indoor Spaces when creating your wishlist:
Choose natural over manufactured materials. For example, having pine needles, other leaves, and seeds in the art area has the potential for deeper conversation than plastic beads.
Emphasize authentic instead of cartoon-like. Consider local bird books or even a poster of real, local birds instead of a caricature poster.
Avoid stereotypes. When possible, bring in materials that disrupt some of the stereotypes that exist about nature, like owls don’t wear glasses, read books, and wear graduation caps.
Represent local nature. Does the space look like our unique place in the world? For example, add books to the library of local plants and animals rather than those far off.
Reflect & represent a diversity of people having positive outdoor experiences. Consider adding photos of children and families from diverse backgrounds the children enjoying the outdoors.
Connect the indoors to the outdoors. Bring the outdoors in and the indoors out.
Take advantage of science & math learning. For example, an indoor activity could be matching pattern shapes like a spiral to images of plants and animals found in our area.
Bonus principle: Virtually everything in the room should have meaning to the children. For alphabet learning, have the children go outdoors and build the letters out of natural materials, then take their photos, and hang the photos on the wall. Now the letter line matters to the children!
Overall, it’s important to consider how teacher-led activities indoors connect to children’s outdoor experiences.
Types of Play
Opportunities should be given to children in as many types of play as possible every day.
Large Motor Play: climbing, running, sliding, swinging, jumping, engaging large muscle groups.
Small Motor Play: stringing beads, puzzles, sorting objects, drawing, writing.
Mastery Play: repeated action & perseverance in play.
Construction Play: building houses, ramps, ships, forts, spaceships, etc.
Risky Play: climbing, sense of being alone (nooks to play in), moving fast, tool use, etc.
Make-Believe Play: "let's pretend...", puppets, storytelling, etc.
Rules-Based Play: games (established or made up) that include clear rules (preschool age)
Language Play: words, rhymes, versus, and songs, tell & dramatize stories.
Rough an Tumble Play: wrestling, tumbling, play fighting, chasing, rolling, etc.
Arts Play: drawing, modeling, creating music, performing puppet shows.
Sensory Play: different textures, sounds, and smells such as dirt, sand, mud, water, flowers, etc.
Other Types of Play: anything else not captured above.
NEXT: EVALUATION
NEXT: EVALUATION
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