Observations are part of a bigger job educators have called PLANNING.
This is a picture of the Early Years Planning Cycle. You can see that after Collecting Information (what we call observations), we then Analyse the information and ask questions, then we make a plan for learning experiences for the children, then we do the plan. The most important thing is to reflect and review at the end to see what went well and what could be done better. Reflecting is also done at the Analyse step. Reflective Practice is something all educators have to learn how to do but we will talk about that in another post. For this post, we are focussing on planning.
Everything that happens at kinder is carefully planned by the educators.
Another word for plan is to organise before the event happens. For example, Kate's character Amar planned her wedding in the movie. In real life Kate has also planned her wedding. She has written all the details down for everything that needs to happen, what equipment is needed, who will do what, using a mind map.
At kinder, we would plan a learning experience for the children in almost the same way. So, for example if we wanted to make the home corner reflect Divali celebrations and Indian culture because we have a lot of Indian children in the Dolphin class, we would make a plan like for Kate's wedding mind map.
In the plan we would list some of these things:
Who are we planning the learning experience for?
When will it happen?
What are the children's ideas on the experience? Will we ask them? When? How?
What equipment do we need? Do we need to do some research? Maybe we could watch the National Geographic documentary on Divali to get some ideas.
Where are we going to get the equipment?
How and when are we going to set up the home corner?
What will the children learn from the experience?
TASK 1: Kate is going to make a real plan for Divali celebrations with the children in 2020 and it will form part of a separate blog post.
TASK 2: Kate - can you plan a dinner party for 3 of your friends at your house. You will cook the meal, decorate the house, set the table, make an invitation. There is a lot to plan. Talk to your coach about the plan and draw it as a mind map on a big piece of paper.
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