Post Three - Final reflection

The feedback that I received from my peers was positive and also made me think of what I should have added into my entry 5. It would have been better if the word count could have been larger so I could add in all the important details that I had left out. One comment that was made was that I talked to the child throughout the process. I believe that it is important to talk to children throughout their projects in order to help extend their development and learning, this also can give the children the opportunity to explore new ideas while they are talking to you. With talking to the children during their projects, asking open questions is a teaching technique that I often use to get the children to extend their development and thinking.

Catering to the child’s needs is important to me, as this can help to extend their own learning while I can guide them. In this experience I catered to the child’s needs by allowing him to choose his own resources while making his boat. In my centre we do not get the chance to do projects like this so it was a great opportunity to allow the child to take control of his own learning. By allowing the child to choose his own resources to make the boat, it allowed him to have control over his own learning. This also allowed the chance for the child to problem solve when things did not work out with creating his boat.

Allowing the child to be able to be problem solve also sometimes means that teachers need to role model how to use some resources that the child may not know how to use. In this project I had to role model how to use a hot glue gun as the child did not know how to use it correctly and this could have meant that the child could have hurt themselves if not shown.

After the experience the child came back to me a week after with a pile of books for us to look through together, this then sparked other children’s interest in our centre. The centre then spent the next two weeks looking and studying different kinds of boats, including how do they float on the water? The older children then created their own boats using different resources to see what causes the boats to float. We also had a parent who makes yacht boats come in and talk to the children. As one of my peers mentioned we looked into going to Half Moon Bay Marina but could not due to not having enough parents being able to come.

In my centre we do not get the chance to explore digital technology in the centre with the children as we do not have the resources to do so but that does not mean that we do not give the children the opportunity to explore other technology in the centre. I feel that my centre gives the children all opportunities to explore new technologies in order to extend their learning and development. By allowing the children to explore new technologies, we give them the chance to extend on their social sciences and allowing the children to extend their knowledge of the outside world. We notice what the children’s interests are and extend their learning and knowledge on that topic. Social studies allow us to also take the children out into the community when studying a certain topic to extend their knowledge on that topic.