A closer look at Play in an Innovate Learning Environment

We have the privilege of hosting Masters students from the University of Canterbury at Haeata Community Campus.  Last week they asked a very good question.

"I was wondering if the philosophy of play-based learning at Haeata focussed on free play or also more structured play?"

from "Learning, Playing and Interacting - Good practice in the Early Years Foundation Stage."

There is much debate around play and what constitutes play and whether children learn 
through play. Learning through play is the outworking of an Innovate Learning

Environment in Hikuawa (our learning hub at Haeata).  
It is developmentally appropriate and responsive to the Ākongas needs.

The above continuum explores the different ways Educators could interact with a child in play.
I like that it is honest, suggesting possibilities of different approaches by educators to play.
It defines possible learning pathways.  According to this continuum, research shows that children learn most effectively in the green-highlighted segments. That is not to say learning doesn't happen in the
outer regions. It suggests the importance of the relationship between teacher and student.

We at Haeata are on a journey. As a team, we continually reflect on our practice. We are in the early stages of creating the most effective environment for our Åkonga (learners) to learn in. The above diagram is proving to be a very helpful tool in achieving this.

At any one time, educators in Hikuawa can be doing the following;

1. Unstructured - Play without adult support noticing what is happening.  

Setting up the environment to support Ākongas needs.

Children learn through self-directed actions. Children are biologically designed to learn through play. 

2.  Child-initiated play - the teacher is supporting the child through coaching.

 Social, emotional, academic coaching. The incredible year's programme provides excellent tools to achieve this. Coaching during the play. The teacher follows the child's lead, reflects on what the child is doing and how they can extend or add next steps.  This is Vygotsky's ZPD in action.

3. Focused learning - During one 90 learning block we provide a range of workshops for
Åkonga to choose from. These workshops flow from the child-initiated play.
They may offer new ideas that children have experienced before.
During this time, we have visiting teachers such as a Kaiako

from our senior school, the local librarian, a teacher of music and a Kapahaka tutor.

A Kaiako (teacher) may take a group out to visit a local building site and notice what

is happening, this workshop comes from the children's interest in building.

One teacher may offer a specific art technique, another, a workshop about forces,

applying this to Beyblades. Still, another may enable the creation of an obstacle course.

4. Highly structured -  Our Phonics lessons are an example of this.
Everyone is in a group designed for their learning stage. Some of our phonics is very playful, but what defines
it as being structured is when the children have to come and participate. We all do phonics after lunch.
In an ideal world, the teaching of phonics would be integrated into the play, but for the time being at least,
this is the best way for us to deliver this skill.

Similarly, for Åkonga ready for a more focused approach, direct instruction, we provide a
specialized writing tutor from within our team. This time also includes some of our Puna Ako group
(those close to our heart), where we teach social and emotional skills explicitly, and
organize personal learning plans. These small groups form the hub of our relationships.
We meet twice a day.

As we continue to develop practice together, for a range of learners, this diagram provides a scaffold for us to understand how we work as a team and how we honestly learn through play.  For example, I am particularly skilled at using play without the adult support through child-initiated play.  I spend a lot of time educating here.  Others in our team focus on adult guided playful experiential learning.  They enjoy setting up workshops for children to join.    Collaboration works wonders as we all bring different ideas into the environment from what we have noticed the Åkonga play.  We move fluidly along the continuum, becoming increasingly skillful at knowing what level of support is needed at any one time.

The type of play that Åkonga joins in is totally up to them.  We trust our learners to make wise decisions.  We view them as capable and able.  Together we are building a culture where learning is irresistible.  It is presented as a banquet table of learning delights. 

 A diagram I created to summarize learning.

Writing developmentally

 As you may know, I teach 5 and 6-year-olds at Haeata Community Campus.  In New Zealand, Ākonga are expected to be ready to begin formal learning of writing at the age of 5.  However, I question that.  Obviously, some are ready. It is a continuum obviously.  The ones who are not ready, in my experience can struggle to achieve, feel defeated, and think they can not write. This affects their learner identity.  The risk is that they generalize this belief and think they can not learn at all.  My goal is not to teach all children the same thing, but to find each child's pathway and teach to that.  Play facilitates this to happen.

As you know, there are a lot of skills that go into learning to write.  

Physical skills.  Able to grasp the pencil.  Able to coordinate the fingers and hand to move in a certain way.  Ākonga (learners) need to be able to listen to different sounds.   Resources that I have helped develop my understanding in this area are PMP and Yolanda Sorryl Phonics programme.   Others I would love to have a look at are Casey Caterpillar ,  Smart: Mark Making and Writing, 0-7 year olds. The Bridge. (Thanks to Jess Holdaway for pointing me to this.)  You will have other great resources I am sure.  Plus just loads of experience.

Mathematical understanding.  Writing is a symbol.  It stands for something.  In the real world, a child picks up an object and it stays the same as they move around it.  Letters have a certain position on a page, they are two dimensional. As children move around letters, they look different, from different positions.  Children need to understand one to one correspondence.    

Thinking skills.  Able to hold an idea in their head for long enough to write it down.  Develop working memory.  Able to focus on a task which is actually very abstract. Play provides an opportunity to develop self-regulation because the children make up their own rules, and to stay in a game, or take part you have to stick to the agreed rules.  "When  involved in play, children's concentration and application to the task are much greater than in academically-directed activities contrived by the teacher."(Dolya, G, 2010, p.10)

Purposeful nature of writing.  We write to convey a message.  What is the learners understanding of writing?  Have they experienced the results of someone writing a message and getting what they wanted?  Have they seen writing in authentic context?  Why do you write?

Authentic contexts to write.  Waiting for turns.

If you watch children freely play, you will notice them practising the above skills.  And that is because as Peter Grey says children want to learn the cultural tools of their society.  Vygotsky believed "that true education is not the mere learning of specific knowledge and skills, it is the development of children's learning abilities that is their capacity to think clearly and creatively plan an implement their plans and communicate their understanding in a variety of ways.  He believed this could be done by providing them with a set of cultural tools for thinking and creating.  These tools are the symbolic systems we use to communicate and analyse reality.  They include signs, symbols, maps, plans, numbers, musical notation, charts, models, pictures and language," (Dolya, G, 2010, p.8). 

A collaborative 'join in if you like'  map.  One child came and got me to show me their part, using loads of oral language.

Children write freely around the place.

As we talk about solving a problem due to the lack of Beyblades, I write.

Play freely outdoor or inside.  Developing physical skills.  Simple bar set.

Zaiden writes a letter to ask for some bikes.  Authentic contexts for writing.

The issue for us teachers is not that play is stopping children from learning, but that we can not recognise what the learning is in the play.  If we did, we would be able to help them progress, by adding in vocabulary and scaffolding opportunities to extend themselves.  

"Young children play and give a running commentary on what is happening.  This is external monologuing. As time goes on, the external monologue is internalised as thought.  When dealing with challenging situations children and adults often find themselves externalise their thoughts thinking aloud.  The speech structures become basic structures of their thinking. This means the development of thought is to a great extent determined by the linguistic ability of the child.  This, in turn, is dependent on the child's socio-cultural experience.  So one of the most important functions of education is to facilitate the development of rich, effective spoken language (Dolya, G, 2010,p9).

As educators of young children, one of our main roles is to support the learning of oral language.  Vygotsky himself says that play is one of the best ways for children to learn oral language.  When I first began learning through play, I didn't know what to look out for.  I had to go back to go forward.  I needed help to learn the what of children's learning and roughly in what order.  This is not linked to age but stage.  Obviously, some children will jump certain things, some learn in their own order, others will need specific support around certain stages. 

I have found using the developmental writing stages has helped me to notice how children learn to write.  As a Primary teacher in New Zealand, it has been important to back the bus up and allow learners to develop important skills at their own pace.   If I don't I am robbing them of learning that provides strong foundations.   We now know earlier is not better.

Here is an example of the one developmental chart  If you google developmental writing, there are others.  

My ultimate goal is to know this learning so well, I can notice it in play, know what comes next and help scaffold the next steps if needed.  

Above all, I want to protect children's learner identity.  No one deserves to think they can not learn as a child.  My son Josiah, has struggled to read and write all his life.  He is now 18 years old.  When he was at school, the most important thing to me was to protect his love of learning.  Being able to read and write is helpful, but not at the cost of learning.  Being able to learn is far more powerful.  Humans all over the world, work out how to learn in many different ways.  Now Josiah can read okay.  He still struggles with physical writing, but guess what, he has a computer.  I remember visiting a Psychiatrist once.  He told me he hardly ever wrote.  He just spoke his words onto a recorder and someone else typed them up.  

And as Nathan Mikaere-Wallis says "There’s no rush to learn to write, and it shouldn’t be formally taught until the age of seven."

Over the last month, I have been collating, writing lists and working out what the foundation skills of writing are.  Here is my most up to date list.  At Haeata Community Campus, we use Individual Learning Plans (ILP) for each Ākonga (learner).  These are loaded onto a database (Link Ed) and we can click on to the goals that are most appropriate.  I have been developing the pre-level 1 of New Zealand Curriculum.  Have a look and see what you think.  I would love your feedback.  Maybe you have already done this.  Wonderful.  Creating this continuum has been really useful for my own understanding.  It will be fascinating to start to apply it to our learners.

Foundation Skills - Writing

I can use my hands and movement to communicate.

I can understand when someone speaks to me.  

I join in a conversation

I can use what I hear in my own way.

I love listening to stories.  

I can retell a story

I can tell my own story.

I can talk about what is happening now, yesterday and tomorrow.

I can tell you about something that happened to me.

I can recognise print symbols in my own world and culture. 

I use print symbols and concepts with enjoyment, meaning and purpose.

I enjoy listening to rhyme.

I can use rhyme on my own.

I can say a simple alliteration phrase.

I can use many different words to express myself.

I can use nouns, verbs, adjectives orally.

I can use the prepositions on, up, over, through, inbetween, in, to describe what I am doing.

Phonics Stage 1 Yolanda Sorryl

General sound discrimination

Speech Sound discrimination

Alliteration

Rhythm

Sound breaks

Rhyme.

I can take part in imaginative play by myself

I can take part in imaginative play with others

I can use my imagination to visualize something.

I can use my imagination to tell a story.

Writing developmental stages 

I can draw a picture

I can scribble something that means something to me

My scribble writing is real writing to me.  It is written in a line.

I can write letters

I can write letters in a row.

I can read what I write.  

I can write letters from left to right and top to bottom.

I can write letters meaningfully into words.  

The words have spaces.

I can copy words found in my environment.

My eyes can track smoothly across the midline and follow movement without moving my head.

Both eyes move at the same time working as one.

My eyes and hands work together as one.

I can tell the difference and the similarities between two or more objects.

I can describe colour, size, shape, position, distance, direction, and orientation of an object.

I can make a pattern, sequence and order.

I can make a whole into parts and parts into a whole.

I can hop

I can skip

I can jump with two feet together

I can balance on one leg 

I can copy actions involving crossing my midline

I can cut and paste shapes

I can colour simple pictures.

I can pick up small objects using a tong or twizzers.

I can unscrew a lid on a bottle and screw it back up.

Level 1B    (NZC curriculum Haeata Verson).

Draw a picture

Talk about the picture

Write a sentence about the picture

Start in the right place

Put a full stop at the end

Leave spaces between words

Write the first sound.

Write the last sound.

Level 1A

Write on the topic

Keep writing interesting so the reader enjoys it.

Plan writing e.g. pictures, simple mind map.

Order ideas

Use different joining words (because, and, but, so, if) to join two ideas in one sentence.

Start sentences with capital letters

Use capital letters for names of people and places

Use punctuation (.?!) correctly

Express feelings about the topic

Start sentences with different words

Use interesting describing words

Use phonics knowledge to write sounds in the order they hear them including digraphs and trigraphs.

Spell some words correctly (Essential list 1-2 and some from list 3-4)

Write all letters the correct way.

Reread writing to check it makes sense

Underline some words and check spelling

Check full stops and capital letters have been used

1P (At Level 1)

Plan writing with a picture

Write two or more sentences

Put a full stop at the end of a sentence

Start a sentence with a capital letter

Try new interesting words

Begin sentences with different words

Write some small words

Write letters around the right way.

Write some middle sounds

Write the sounds in the order they hear them.

Use word endings? s, ed, ing.

Use word cards to help them write.

Reread writing to check it makes sense.

Improve writing by adding some more detail

I look forward to hearing back from your experiences.  I actually think that the foundation skills cover most of the subjects we teach at Stage 1.  These are the skills learners need prior to beginning formal learning.   While I have them for writing, they could apply to general thinking skills needed to learn.

I have used several resources to collate this list. 

References 
Te Whariki.  
Yolanda Sorryl Phonics programme   
PMP programme.  
Barbara Brand   
Developmental writing charts.  
Vygotsky in Action in the Early Years.  The key to learning curriculum.  By Galina Dolya.
Free to Learn. By Peter Grey.