Learning through play

4 March 2019Learning through Play

On Saturday I had the opportunity to attend the Learning through play Foundation Workshop presented by Longworth Education. It was an incredibly motivating day allowing me time for reflection and giving me a deeper understanding of the importance of play for our learners.

In response to the need for social skills and oral language learning needs, Panmure Bridge has been on this journey for a few years now. The workshop helped affirm what we have already been doing at school through our purposefully designated play classroom,  Flying Fives.  The next step on our journey was to implement play throughout the junior school classrooms while still ensuring a balance of direct intentional instruction and self directed exploration.

 

As I am taking the New Entrant class this year, I was questioning whether my current practise of pulling learners for guided sessions and doing whole class structured activities in the morning was the correct path to take. Doing play based learning in the classroom and visiting Flying Fives twice a week afforded me the opportunity to have guided explicit teaching as well as a chance to interact with the learners uninterrupted. It felt fantastic hearing them actually recommend a similar manner of running learning through play every day whole day.

Learnings/ AHA moments.
* Do away with topic and or themes...provide provocations instead.
* Authentic play develops higher cognitive and socio skills i.e. cannot be teacher driven.
* Learners are dominating the talk in play based learning and this provides lots of opportunity for vocabulary enrichment and gifting of language.


Ramblings / Rumblings:
* How can I enhance the learning through play with the use of iPads?
* Am I to focussed on the product and not focussing enough on the process (level learners are at vs learning achieved)?

School Data and WFR.

This year I was really interested in hearing about our junior school data and any trends across the cluster from Rebecca Jansen and the WFR team. I wanted to use their musings as a starting point for deeper discussions within our team meetings and to help  teachers understand the importance of analysing the data as a cluster.

Taking this back to our team meetings and having a closer look at our own data gave us the spring board to ensuring we are meeting the needs of our learners, preempting any trends that may surface and sharing our collective ideas. It also gave us the opportunity to show our 2nd year BT and 1st Year BT teachers that they have worthwhile ideas and are seen as a valuable part of our team. 

Rebecca shared that Writing Vocabulary needed addressing and so we discussed how we could show this in our planning and explicitly teach it. Rebecca also noted that we were making good progress but not enough for acceleration. We further discussed effective ways and ideas that could be implemented to help achieve accelerated shift.

Learnings/ AHA moments:

* Making good progress in Writing

* Positive data for junior school and specific points of interest to focus on.

Ramblings/ Rumblings:

* How can play based learning help with accelerated shift in writing?

* How can I transfer the oral language and reading vocabulary into Writing?

Colloquial Language vs The Language of Maths

The learners are now becoming more familiar, excited and engaged with problem solving tasks in Maths. They are also becoming more confident in sharing their ideas and strategies with the class. Asking questions to gain clarity is consistently being worked on with learners asking more 'Why' and 'How' questions.
The next step I had planned was to introduce a 'What if we' and a 'Could we' into the sharing session in order for learners to think deeper about strategies being used and deepen the level of understanding of the big ideas around Maths. I have however changed course slightly as I am beginning to wonder if, when and how to transition learners into using more mathematical vocabulary when explaining their ideas and strategies. My fear is that all the fantastic shift in attitude, and improved communication will suffer. I would need to do more research with regards to how best to implement this shift and whether this shift in use of vocabulary is necessary at this stage. Currently the learners are communicating effectively and having their voices heard by their peers. The big question is:

Would the introduction of more mathematical language change the tone of the problem to one that is more impersonal and thus loose the interest of the learners.

Research:

NZ MATHS LINK

Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration By Glenda Anthony and Margaret Walshaw.

Teacher Tools

In Maths we have been focussing on our known fact knowledge and how to use this as a strategy to solve problems. I have used the Teacher tools digital tools and transferred them onto the Explain Everything app for the ipads, using the exact wording and context given. I measured the engagement level, level of talk and ability to solve the problems by observing the learners in action. All the students were engaged and completed the tasks.

I then used the same problem but changed the wording of the problem.  The context was changed to appeal to the learners based on what I knew about them. I again measured the engagement level, level of talk and ability to solve the problem through observation. The learners were now not only engaged in the task but excited to complete the task. I also included an element of create. The tasks had to be completed in order to solve a mystery eg. which picture was the principals favourite, what ice- cream did the teacher bring to school today. The children then had to create their own problem with a mystery when the answer was correct. Other students, including the teacher then had an opportunity to solve the problem and answer the mystery.

In conclusion I now have learners asking for mystery problem solving tasks.