Curriculum – Learning Stories Maps, Posties, French

[ms-user]

EYLF Principle Partnerships with Families

  

Early Years Learning Framework

Principle 2

Partnership
Family Input.
Now you have collected family input, how do
you put it into practice?		 a traffic light, a road”. “What is the road you drive really,
really fast on and has no traffic lights” asked a child?

teacher from Enchanted
Tree Tops in Hornsby
NSW.

Family Input.

“This method of linking
family weekends to our
centre has given me a
whole new energy boost to
my teaching. We are only a

small centre and we know our families very well, but this
has really connected and linked families to the curriculum.

We started after Easter and most children went to the
beach and some camping. Today we pulled down the tent
from inside. On one of our parent sheets we saw a father 		The children drew their own maps. (1metre x 700mm 5 kg
of paper sourced from eBay). The educators assisted by
labelling items on their maps. “I see you drew a large
school” said Karen. “Yes I want to go to a really big
school!” said the child.
We do many excursions at our centre, so we organised a
walking tour using our maps to get to 3 children’s houses
that were close by. One and a half hours later… The
children were very interested in the road signs and street
names which linked to the atlas. We met a female ‘Postie’
and the children asked her how she turned off her bike. She
showed them and continued by showing the children the
letters in her bags and how they are sorted to match the
numbers and street addresses. The ‘Postie’ was like an
excursion within an excursion. The children talked to her
and asked more questions for about 20 mins. The ‘Postie’
connected the mail to the maps and the important
elements and structures of both labelling and identifying.
using a map to get to the camp ground. We brought in a
map and a road atlas/street directory.

All we have been doing for the last few weeks was craft
based around the beach, camping and maps. The maps and
road atlas excited the children. We started off by showing
them the street names and suburbs. When I opened the
page to a map, the children were very curious and asked
many questions. “Why is this green?” “That’s a park, here is

Maps continued further into the world.

The left hand side is where we add the learning outcomes
after the events. The right hand side are the activities we
write down. We don’t add all the activities such as lunch,
etc, as far too many exciting things happen during our day.

Starting with a blank curriculum, and building and
extending it is so much easier than trying to come up with ideas on your own.

Barriers and Problems

I rang Matt and asked, “how long should we be doing craft
for?” Matt said, “ask the children how long they want to
continue craft for.”

The children said, “I don’t know”. Reflecting on this has
shown me children are not aware that they are in control of
During the week, we have been connecting our maps and
excursion further into the curriculum. We have many
children at our center who were either born overseas or
their parents are from many different countries. Our
drawing area has now included a globe and we have placed
each child’s name on their country of origin.

And I’m learning French…

One child has a new sibling and his Grandmother is
here from France and speaks no English. We are
enjoying learning French.

Documenting

We launched into EYLF with a blank sheet of paper. We
didn’t use our old curriculum to start with. We printed out
and displayed the symbols and the sheets so we could find
the learning outcomes when we came back to documenting
our curriculum.

their learning. We are going to explore this further by giving
them permission to be in control of their learning and
activities.

What amazed me is the amount each child knows, and
what we don’t allow them to show as we are far too in
control of the curriculum. We need to teach children how
to learn, rather than teaching them content.

Family Input Problems

I had a family meeting and as a result, we have left blank
sheets so each family can contribute at any time. For
example, a child broke her arm during the week. We
needed to add this to the curriculum immediately. Great
learning we can extend on…

This is such a better way to view children

The biggest thing I’ve realised is that we don’t really know
what each child knows when we plan our curriculum. As
educators, we assume too much. The new method is
amazing.

Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and
Workplace Relations, 2009 Early Years Learning Framework.

Karen is meeting the Learning Outcomes through strong
family partnership and having a great time.

From EYLF. Learning outcomes are most likely to be achieved
when early childhood educators work in partnership with families.
Educators recognise that families are children’s first and most
influential teachers.

[/ms-user]