Supporting, deepening & extending learning, cont.
How do we do this?
Children are usually highly motivated when they are engaging in freely chosen activities. Obstacles to overcome often arise and lead to divergent thinking as they identify and try to overcome problems. These are crucial times when practitioners should consider extending the learning opportunities without ruining the child’s play experiences.
Practitioners can:
- Use resources to help extend the play: By observing the children playing (Wait, watch, wonder), practitioners can determine whether to add or remove resources that can support or add challenge to the activity.
- Effective questioning is valuable: Effective questioning originates from Lev Vygotsky and his theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). This was very much about looking at what the child can do without adult help and what they can do with an adults help. Including this concept into practice will help give practitioners more of an understanding as to why their role is vital in supporting, deepening and extending children’s learning and development.
- Create a supportive learning environment for children to develop their own ideas and make links between them: Help children voice their thoughts and talk about possibilities. Practitioners can use a combination of “I wonder…?” comments, questioning, and engaging in the activity if the child invites them in.
- Support their interests over time: Remind them of what they’ve done before and engage in sustained shared thinking. Use floorbooks, learning walls and digital platforms to reflect on previous work.
- Show and talk about strategies: How to remember things, ways of solving a problem, how to make a plan.
- Keep the problem going and support children to come up with their own solutions rather than giving them an answer.
- Value their questions: Show you do not always know the answer yourself. Be a thinker with them.
- Encourage cooperation and joint problem solving: Children learn a lot from each other.
- Help them think about approaches and make links between experiences, ‘remember what happened when you….?’
- Make learning explicit to them: Encourage them to think about how they are learning, not just what they are learning. Make learning visible.
- Tell them what you noticed about their learning: Point out what they did to help them learn. For example, “Well done, you managed to attach that bungee cord by pulling really hard.” “Wow, you managed to build that tower by concentrating really hard and thinking carefully about where to place each brick.”
- Encourage children to reflect on the task: Engage in conversations, using photographs and video to support reflection on previous learning. Discuss what they did before and ways that they have improved. Support the children to consider what is going well and how they might develop their ideas.
- Give them feedback: Help the children to think about what they are trying to do and encourage them to keep exploring different ideas that they could experiment with. Support them when things don’t go according to plan and to keep trying.
