To know our learners

Estelle here!

Settling in is always the headline in September in Pre-K (and across the school, even for us teachers!). This year in my mind “Settling In” was capitalised and in neon! As colleagues, in our Early Years section, we have settled into new teams and for some of us this has meant joining a new grade level. All of us have set up new classroom environments and become familiar with and made our mark, with our students, on new teaching spaces.

Books have been a great tool for supporting settling in. I realise that I’ve adopted a “stop, drop (what I was doing - when possible) and read” approach. We have placed many wonderful books in our environment and when a child comes to share a book I stop and read with them. It’s lovely how other children spontaneously join us. This has really helped build relationships with the children.

Meeting new children and new families happened via Zoom this year, instead of in their homes on the child’s turf. At least the children were able to see our smiles on Zoom. In class these are hidden behind the masks that we permanently wear. So, we compensate, voices are used more carefully to communicate emotion, our eyes speak/smile and, more than normal, we make sure that we are down at the level of the children making eye contact as much as possible. My body language is slightly exaggerated too, so that the children can ‘read’ it more easily and I am explicitly teaching them to tune into and interpret body language using games and dramatic reading of story books.

Seven weeks ago class lists were unfamiliar collections of names, dates of birth, home languages and other, helpful but unnarrated, data. It’s worth celebrating how each name is now known to me and our team as an individual character. Each child brings and builds a unique set of stories. Some of these have become part of the storytelling narrative of our setting, for example D&P (4 yr olds) in Sun Class and their fascination with cars and transport.

There's S, aged 3 (also in Sun Class) and his repetitive revisiting of transporting schema. Not forgetting, W and her drawings that Simon blogged about. These individual interests are documented on Seesaw. Our Seesaw posts are quick, to the point and, as much as possible, in the moment. The myriad of tiny details of each child as an individual learner are stored in each teacher’s (or educarer, as Karen - one of our three amazing TAs would like us to be called) head. Maybe there is a gap here in our practice, we are beginning to think. Should some of our documentation go deeper? Documenting individual inquiries using learning stories is something we are planning on developing.

A student in my class, Star Class, is interested in cooking and anything to do with combining and mixing. He also loves to help. Making bird feeders appealed to him on so many levels.

In early October we had some relevant and thought provoking Early Years training with a visiting consultant, Tricia Herbert. She asked us to tune into our students as learners by answering these questions from the child’s perspective.

What capabilities do you bring to school? 

What do you look forward to doing? 

What are you curious about? 

What are you apprehensive about? 

What do you expect from your teacher?

In the workshop we were asked to complete the exercise for one student and, importantly, not the first student who came to mind. Many of us went on to do this for all the children in our class. In the same week we had parent teacher conferences via Zoom and the insight revealed by focussing on the answers to these questions greatly helped us put the individual at the heart of these conversations with parents. If you have time I would recommend you try it for a student, a group or even your own class. Let us know how you get on! Would you add any other questions to the list?