Once a week I go to a kindergarten for my placement and last
week I was given the opportunity to witness how other important members of a
child’s life can help them be aware of important literacy and numerical
concepts through different learning experiences at the kindergarten. Every day the children at the
kindergarten are provided with many experiences where they are able to gain
different numeracy and literacy skills.
One experience that the teachers set up for the children at
the kindergarten was painting with water colour paints. To turn this into a numeracy-related
experience, the teachers had on display at the table, five soft toys that they
use in the kindergarten to help children understand different feelings. These
toys were of different geometrical shapes such as a square, triangle, owl
shape, oval and a shape that had many different spiky corners. The children were
given the opportunity to paint the shapes of these toys using the paints.
Through painting these shapes children are also able to learn about how these
shapes are used in objects that they see in their daily lives. When I observed
the children painting these shapes, they used numbers to count the sides of the
shapes, they had to count how many corners there were on the shapes and they
also had to paint the shapes of the eyes. Each child who painted the shapes was
really focused on getting the correct number of sides and corners for each
shape. To connect these shapes to the real world, I was able to talk to the
children about what objects are there that are in the shape of a triangle,
square, oval, spiky shape and owl shape. They talked about how a square shape
can be a box or a television and that the spike shape looked like the shape of
the sun. I found it interesting how one boy described the shape of the owl; he
said that the owl had a big circle for the boy and a smaller circle for the
head and then two triangles connecting to the head. This really amazed me that
he was able to see these shapes in the owl shape and this helped him to be able
to paint the owl shape really well.
I believe this experience that
the teachers created was really good in helping children to identify different
shapes and connect them to shapes that they see in objects every day. Also
being able to paint or draw these shapes, they will be able to use these skills
they have obtained when going into primary school and building on these skills
as they continue to grow older. Through this experience the teachers were able to help shape young children's numeracy experiences through creating this learning experience to paint the different shapes of the toys. From observing this experience it has been able
to help me to also be able to think about the types of experiences I will be
able to create for children to be able to gain different numeracy skills and parents too will be able to use this experience and create their own experiences to help children gain literacy and numeracy skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment