Interacting with Babies & Toddlers at Placement

My First Experience at Placement 

Before parents and children arrived, I honestly didn't know what to expect. My group and I tried to create a broad range of activity stations by bringing in toys, books and setting up a drawing table. The vast majority of children that arrived were under the age of 1. I found this was a bit difficult when your group is required to cater for ages 0-5yrs. How can you facilitate the activities for such a broad range when there are no toys at our site? I felt as though I was expected to know how to accomplish this task with not enough guidance on how this is achieved. Did anyone else have these thoughts or difficulties? 

I feel like I wasn't the only one in my group who felt a bit over welmed by the situation so as a group we spoke about the different things we can try to make and be creative with to engage with babies and toddlers. The ideas were facilitated by our mentor to guide us in the right direction and we came up with ideas such as water bottles with items inside and home made musical instruments, and to stay with our learning topic of Aboriginal Culture we then thought of things like rain sticks & clap sticks. I think that staying with these sorts of activities allow these ages to interact together. I have also come to the conclusion that placement is a time for pre-service teachers to learn. Going with the flow of things and letting the children decide what they would like to do. Engaging with the parents and building a rapport with them about their experiences and enabling feedback to create an even deeper understanding. 

 

Visit to Bunjilaka Exhibition

Visit to Bunjilaka Exhibition

After my visit to the Bunjilaka exhibition at the Melbourne museum I connected with the story and it affected my learning where I wanted to learn more about the history and culture. I began to watch movies relevant to the colonisation of Australia and the stolen generations, Rabbit Proof Fence being one of them. My initial thoughts and feelings when entering the exhibition were how intense the setting was. The space was dark and gloomy, although it had well lit areas to portray the importance of the story the exhibition was telling. In contrast, I had discussions with a few family friends and they felt like the story was political and could be taken offensively. Especially when talking about Aboriginals being forced to fight in the Vietnam war, controversy was spoken about how the exhibition story tellers said that it shouldn't have been compulsory for Aboriginals as they weren't apart of this particular culture of war. Personally I believe that Aboriginal culture should be recognised as it is the true history of Australia and should be taught in schools. I believe the education should be informative and true knowledge. The teacher should engage children through the connection of place-thought and past-present to understand and grasp concepts effectively. A great exercise to incorporate an interesting lesson is too collect things outdoors and allowing the children the freedom to research certain aspects of their land and they place they live in.

Open Pod Classrooms - Do they really work?

Open Pod Classrooms

Does open pod learning really work efficiently? From the research that I have found, this particular type of learning environment has been used in the past and most information I have come across details that it hasn't worked that well. This is because children would often be distracted and get lost in what they are learning. After speaking to a teacher that currently works in a primary school that uses the open pod learning style, she has shared multiple experiences where children find it hard to concentrate on their tasks. From a teachers perspective, it can be difficult to manage your group if they are doing quite tasks that require no discussion and the other group is doing noisy open discussion. So my question is, why are schools using this open learning style today? Children's learning isn't an experiment, their lives depend on all these early stages of knowledge and making good habits in school. As a pre-service teacher I think that this could work if all groups were conducting classes the same way. This could enhance learning and ideas shared across groups would be the same to reduce confusion and children becoming lost in their learning. It could also generate a more creative approach as learning could be through their social groups as well as from their teacher. I believe that structure and direction is what children need in all ages through primary school to prepare them for secondary school.