Week 7 Reading Blog

 What?

The two readings I used to support my learning this week were ‘Creating and using a mathematical environment’ by Tucker (2010) and ‘Learning to Read the World: Literacy in the first 3 years’ by Rosenkoetter & Knapp-Philo (2004). This week I was interested in looking into the learning environment and how we as educators can structure it best to allow for the most beneficial exploratory learning and also how our interactions with children can help guide learning and the relationship between the environment and intentional teaching. Therefore I felt these articles provided a comparison between these questions in the form of answering my broader question of, how do children make sense of their environment through literacy and numeracy?

So what?

The article by Tucker (2010) provided a comprehensive overview of the practical ways in which educators could support mathematical learning and the development of numeracy through the structure of the learning space and consequently how it effects a child’s ‘psychological’ and ‘physical’ learning attitudes (p.15).  Tucker (2010) outlined the importance of the environment on learning outcomes where the resources, organisation of physical space, and correspondence of inside and outside environments can enhance or limit learning in the form of encouraging multimodal and diverse ways of thinking, diversity of experience, self-confidence and autonomy, shared intentionality, individualised learning processes and enjoyment.

The second article by Rosenkoetter & Knapp-Philo (2004) explored how children develop early literacy in the form of everyday communication and interaction where:
- words and their corresponding concrete and implied symbols help form literal and applied understandings.
- Through the use of verbal, drawn and written and other multi-modal forms of communication children begin to realise their own autonomy
- Children gradually build a personal profile and repertoire of communication within family, cultural, social and community contexts by interacting, imitating, observing and creating using literacy
- With continuous exposure to words, books, speech, signs and symbols children learn to understand their world
- Successful literacy learning depends on the following relationships and the partnerships they create: (see diagram below)

                                                     

Now what?

Both articles illustrated the highly integrated nature of literacy and numeracy within every day, exploratory experience that centred on interaction within the social context. Children therefore make sense of their environment through literacy and numeracy as these skills give them the tools to be able to communicate, explore and form understandings. While much of the literacy and numeracy development comes from being a social, environmental and psychological participant within their world. From a more practical point of view, educators can structure the learning space for optimal engagement by utilising everyday materials and involving children in the creation and implementation of learning experiences by encouraging imaginative play, creative expression and shared thinking.

References

Rosenkoetter, S. & Knapp-Philo, J. (2004). Learning to read the world: Literacy in the first 3 years. Zero to Three, 25(1), 4-9

N) Tucker, K. (2010). Why play? & Creating and using a mathematical environment. Mathematics through play in the Early Years (pp. 5-14). London: SAGE Publications

Outcome 1.2

Week 5

 An Experience: describe something you saw or were a part of & what you learnt as a result

 I was at a family gathering over the weekend and I was observing my second cousin (who I will call by the pseudonym of 'Sarah'), who is three and a half, engaged in play with a set of animal families and a train set. The way she assigned personalities to each animal figurine and how she connected the two worlds of the animal families to that of the train set, directed my thinking to how literacy is so interconnected in everything we do and experience. Imaginative play fascinates me, how during childhood we have the potential to create other realities, separating the reality of the present from the reality of the imagined, yet still exist and communicate within the two environments at the same time. Sarah continued to switch between communicating within the two different contexts quickly and effortlessly, whenever she was spoken to by an adult she would lift her head, reply to what they were saying and then go back to displaying the personality of the animal she was impersonating in her imaginative play.

I was amazed at how well she could modify her communication style to suit the context. This observation drew my attention to the point that Barratt-Pugh (2000) made in her article, how so much of the learning involved with literacy and becoming literate is embedded in our everyday social and cultural interactions and understandings. Where Sarah was demonstrating her understanding in a practical sense of what family meant, which social roles were required, how trains could be used for transport, how dialogue can be used to represent talking and communicating within situations and how social roles can be represented and recreated between contexts. Sarah was also able to process and make sense of what was happening in her external, physical world whilst being simultaneously engaged with her internal, cognitive world.


Relevance to Topic Outcome:

1.2 Explains how young children’s literacy & numeracy learning can be socially conveyed through their behaviour, feelings or approach

References:

Barratt-Pugh, C. (2000). The socio-cultural context of literacy learning. In C. Barratt-Pugh & M. Rohl (Eds.), Literacy learning in the early years (pp. 1-27). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin