Module Two: Support and extend children’s learning

By the end of this module, you will……

• increase your awareness of the effective methods of engaging children with diverse abilities and interests in learning
• Use a range of strategies to extend children’s learning and evaluate impact on the progress

Benefits of positive adult interaction

• Enables children to use and apply their knowledge, skills and understanding in a variety of ways
• Extends children’s learning through adult engagement and makes it fun!

Activity 1

What are the main challenges that you have experienced in your attempts to engage with young children?

Response to Activity 1

• Knowing when to interact/intervene without disrupting learning
• When children ask questions or request support when you have deliberately structured activities to encourage independent learning.
• When children actively seek your response

Suggested strategies for positive engagement with children

• Observe, observe, to find out what the children are to do, their roles and part they want to play in the activity
• Reflect whether you need to join in and identify the best time, making the most of the opportunity!
• Ensure that your ideas that are linked to the theme of the learning to ensure continuity in learning!
• Make use of your good knowledge of the children to structure key questions (directed to specific children, skilfully using the outcome of your assessment) in a way that will extend their learning.

Benefits of positive engagement

• Provides structured learning opportunities for children to acquire new knowledge
• Model new skills which are subsequently learnt by the children through imitation and regular practice
• Increased motivation levels. For example, children are enthusiastic when adults join in during daily active, musical movement sessions.

Strategies for positive engagement

• Use open ended probing questions to challenge children’s thinking
• Clarify the purpose of learning which is linked well to children’s individual learning needs or reinforce
  what they ‘already know’ or ‘can do’
• Structure tasks in interesting and imaginative ways. For example create suspense through the children receiving a ‘mystery letter’ mystery guest, ‘finding a suspect’ who has vandalised their classroom or organise a search party for a missing classroom pet rabbit!
• Use familiar story lines to create a storyboard
• Use technology such as digital camera to take pictures of familiar objects and provide children with opportunities to do the talking!
• Provide passive children with opportunities to undertake the role of the teacher by leading the learning!

Summary tips

• Make use of effective strategies such as questions/ prompts, demonstration, scaffolding, modelling are used to support and extend learning. This may be achieved through discussions, modelling new ideas, using visual resources such as flashcards, eading a book (independently or in small groups) undertaking action songs, encouraging social interaction, talking through practical activities (such as cooking, modelling, sensorial experiences with textures such as corn flour, jelly, paint) in order to show how it is done which makes learning more meaningful!
• Remember to be flexible and reshape the learning as required to ensure that all children regardless of their ability, move forward in their learning
• Are the activities purposeful? Is there a clear learning focus?
• Does planning provide opportunities to deepen pupils learning? (especially for high ability pupils?
• Make ongoing assessment of progress by reflecting on the skills, knowledge and understanding that children have gained after the activity.
• The key question is what has children been able to do at the end of the activity that they were not able to do before? A skilful practitioner ‘who knows their children very well’ will be able to provide detailed information on this, if the ctivity was successful!
• Reinforce concepts learnt through short review through summative statement such as ‘You can now identify next number after 5’ We found out that a chick comes from an egg’ ‘We found out that a piece of paper floats on water

Reflection Questions

• What methods do you currently use to interact with children?
• Which alternative methods could you use taking into account the needs of the children?
• Who does most of the talking? You or the children?
• Which ways can you suggest to allow the children to talk more, express their thoughts and demonstrate their knowledge?
• Which ways can you use questions to deepen children’s learning?