Guest Post: Documenting Children's Learning

We are very lucky to have a fabulous guest post this week from inspirational Reception teacher Elizabeth Jobson. This week we will explore child led learning in her Reception class... her truly favourite place to be in education.

 

 

I am a big fan of child initiated and interest led learning; applying this to my practice daily. I make this evident in my classroom in a range of ways; one of them being my displays. I feel the reading area is one of the most important areas in the classroom and it must be cosy, calm and filled with books relevant to the current topic so children can further their learning and understanding in their independent learning time. This year, I decided on a simple display. All it took was some yarn and mini pegs. At the end of each week, I print out the covers of the books we have read. It is such an easy display to keep up with but look how effective it looks. I leave the books in the reading area until the end of the topic/half term and the children have been looking at the display spotting books they enjoyed a couple of weeks ago and reading them independently… so it is working.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is my most favourite display of all…Our Learning Journey. At the beginning of each half term, we decide on a topic (through the children’s interests) and think of a question to investigate during that topic. The question goes in the centre of the display – Autumn 2018 being “Is it always a happy ending?” – With reference to traditional stories and fairytales. Then there is a part for each week and we fill it up week by week, adding things we have made, take photographs of, written, learnt etc. and this will be full by the end of the topic…a bit like a scrapbook! The children love spotting their work and photographs up there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Word Wall:

 

 

 

This is mainly a phonics orientated display and is PERFECT for Reception. They are just beginning to learn new phonemes and graphemes and applying them to their writing. I take a photocopy of any new words and stick them up. It’s not very full so far but we have only had two weeks of phonics; I am really pleased with how neutral and effective this looks. All my displays endorse learning at the same pace as the class. They identify the children’s interest and encourage the children to take a sense of pride in all the work they complete as it may feature on our displays!

 

To promote child interest led learning even further, I have took the approach of floor-books, beginning during my first year at my current school, where I was placed in Nursery. The Floor-book Approach is a child-led approach to observation, documentation and planning which has now been applied and used in settings across the world. By really listening to children and giving them time to think and time to talk, it can create inspirational learning opportunities. Children learn best when they are actually interested in a topic or idea: by nurturing their fascinations you can explore complex subjects such as floating and sinking and the children are more involved in the direction their learning goes by using these Floor-books. Having a physical piece of evidence of their learning means they are free to look back upon them too and recall things they’ve experienced. Here are the Floor-books we created together last year; our topics always begin with a question we must answer in order to provide a ‘hook’ for the children. Our topics were; Autumn, Space, Dinosaurs, Transport, The Jungle and Pirates.

 

 

Being in an area that is often labelled as ‘deprived’, when I first came to the school I felt the children were also ‘tarred with the same brush’ so to speak; because of where the school was, they wouldn’t be expected to be great achievers. Well… I have most certainly proved them wrong! The children in my class last year (fourteen of which have moved up with me to Reception this year) are the most hard working, willing and resilient I have come across in my short career of teaching. They take pride in their learning and the work they produce, they problem solve not only independently but as a team and I could not be more proud of them and the work they have produced during their short time in Reception… we will be writing novels and painting masterpieces by the Summer term!