Interpreting & Planning
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
Interpreting Children's Thinking
After observing and documenting children's play (see above), look back on your documentation to interpret the meaning of the play you observed using metacognition. This can be during planning time or at the end of each day.
Interpret Children's Play
Interpreting Thinking (IT) Form
To use the IT form:
Look back on all your collected documentation and think about why it was captured. What was significant about each observation? What questions did you note on the OR form?
Write about what you think the children's play was about, using statements like "I think [child] is doing X because of Y" and "we think the children are interested in X because of Y".
Imagine you are the child and write what they might have been thinking during a particular observation related to what they might already know. For example, if a child said "push the button", they might be thinking: "I know that when I press buttons, things happen, and I'm curious what will happen when we press this button."
Use & Teach Metacognition
Metacognition: the thinking about your own thinking (reflection).
Interpreting children's play uses the skill of metacognition. This 21 day study on chicks is a great example of how metacognition is implemented with an emergent curriculum.
Don't forget to teach children to use this strategy as well! See the video below for an example.
Planning
The COI pattern includes observing, documenting, interpreting, and then intervening with a provocation. When you follow this pattern, your practice is a lot like a researcher's, studying with children and about children. This requires thinking on many levels about strategies that use divergent thinking. The goal is to design future leaning experineces that have continuity with the children's thinking and prior experience. For our planning process, first, explore what you want to pursue with the children using divergent planning. Then, bring your ideas into a lesson plan with convergent planning. The COI has two planning forms. The Curriculum Action Planning (CAP) form helps you consider questions you and the children have that can guide the children's inquiry a bit further, brainstorm and record these as curricular ideas. This brainstorming leads to the Inquiry Provocation Plan (IPP) form, where you can narrow down these ideas into a provocation for the next steps in learning. Finally, we have a weekly planning form to show the bigger picture plan.
Divergent Planning
While looking back at your interpretations of the children's play, explore what you want to pursue with the children. Think of different ways to challenge, guide, or question the children to extend their play into the areas you think they are working with. This is how threads of the curriculum are developed with the children's interests in mind.
Curriculum Action Planning (CAP) Form
There are three sections on the CAP form:
Action Questions
Look back at your interpretations and write down some questions to explore based on what you think the children want to understand more about.
Provocation Strategies
You are in charge of guiding the curriculum here by provoking thought and providing opportunities that engage the children for learning. Brainstorm here any materials, activities, or additional questions/statements that could extend learning from the action question listed.
Check for Big Ideas
From the questions listed and your knowledge as a teacher of these children, do you see a bigger picture forming? Pull in the NAEYC Standards and TS GOLD Objectives to the big idea and choose up to three areas to be looking for and to document for each child.
Convergent Planning
Create planned interventions or teacher led lesson plan with the ideas you've generated from thinking about the children's play.
Inquiry Provocation Plan (IPP) Form
When filling out the IPP form, make sure to include enough detail so that another person could easily set up, implement, and guide what you are planning. The form includes two pages. Page one can be filled out once, and page two for each teacher-led activity/lesson.
Page 1:
Big Idea: What is the big idea?
Action Questions: Choose 5 action questions for the week.
Rationale & Evidence: Why are you pursuing these questions? What helped you formulate your questions?
Page 2: Design each Provocation
Materials: provide open ended materials that relate to the big idea, and a book of the day.
Setup: Design the play environment to be the third teacher and to invite the children to explore.
Questions: See this handout for types of questions to ask.
Procedures: How will you introduce the children to the provocation? What are the step by step actions you will take? How will you document their learning? What are you looking for?
Next: Fill in a 5 day lesson plan using the action questions and provocations.
Weekly Planning
Our Weekly Lesson Planning Template ties it all together with a plan that can be edited as you go. Circle time is the time to share the action question of the day and read a relevant book. There should be music and movement as well every day, and nature based teacher-led activities both indoor and outdoor. *See the Quality Care and Ratios page for the daily schedule template.
The daily activities should:
Allow for the children to explore, discover, and create with diverse materials.
Incorporate nature as much as possible and connect to the current seasons and ecosystems happening in the now.
Make sequential sense to the teachers and students based on previous learning and development.
