Portfolio Page 4.1

Outcome 4.1 – Critiques other plausible perspectives on early literacy & numeracy awareness & immersion

At a kindergarten that I once did a day of placement at, I noticed that they taught the children in different ways to the ways that many other kindergartens taught children. At this kindergarten the children were given many sheet work activities to do that were set for them instead of setting up experiences where the child could create and explore themselves.

An experience that I saw was that there were stencils on the table for the children to use; these stencils were just bought from a store already made. I don’t believe that using these stencils would’ve taught the children many skills at all as they weren’t really using their imagination in creating their own pictures. Instead they were using pictures that were already made.

I believe that this experience could have worked better to help children develop their skills in numeracy and literacy if the children were given the task to create their own stencils with the help of a teacher. Then the children would’ve been able to use their own imaginations and creative skills to be able to draw a picture of an object that they could turn into a stencil. Through doing this they would’ve been learning about how to draw shapes and how to use their imagination to be creative. It would’ve also given them opportunities to use their literacy skills to be able to talk about what they were creating for their stencil and why they chose that object. They could’ve also used the stencils that they created to draw pictures and then tell a story that could go with the pictures that they drew with the stencils.

 

As an early childhood educator, if I do end up working in a kindergarten or in an early learning centre, I hope that I wouldn’t just give children sheet work to do as this wouldn’t help to expand their imagination and help them develop many skills at all for literacy and numeracy. I believe that children should be given experiences that will help them to explore and create and use their imaginations so that they can learn many different things. To this kindergarten, I would suggest that they stop using sheet work for the children and let them learn through play and experiences where they can experiment and create things on their own. As I believe that children should have freedom to learn in any way that they want to develop literacy and numeracy skills instead of being given set work for them to do as this can be boring and children should be allowed to learn through many different areas such as playing outside, through craft activities where children can create anything they want and through using blocks to build things with.