3.2 Shows competence in observing & planning for literacy & numeracy experiences & environs, adapting to specific learner needs, interests & contexts
I've recently come across this video of two siblings playing together and found the children demonstrating many literacy and numeracy skills.
Here are some of my running observations while watching this video:
1. The girl's babbling demonstrates a literacy skill. She is learning to communicate and use verbal language to express herself.
2. The boy reaches for a block first with his left hand, and then uses both hands to reach for multiple blocks. This is a great opportunity for numeracy as he may be taught the concept of left and right, and quantity awareness as he understands he can grab more if he uses both hands.
3. The girl reaches for her brother's shirt. She shows interest in something on the shirt, possibly a pattern or a texture. She demonstrates spatial awareness by properly estimating how much she needs to reach over to grab hold of the shirt.
4. The boy attempts to use his words in asking his sister to let go of his shirt.
5. The boy whines and makes crying sounds without actually shedding any tears. This may be because he assumes that he gets his way with crying or commonly uses crying as a way to seek attention.
6. The girl shows a response to her brother's whining with a look of regret. She understands that her actions have caused a negative consequence.
7. The mother's voice here does show some intentional interfering in the children's own learning which I found to be slightly unnecessary but perhaps she was just trying to help both children make sense of the situation.
8. The girl constantly reaches over for the blocks in her brother's hands while making verbal sounds to indicate her want for the blocks.
9. The boy consistently reaches for new blocks to be added on to his tower. This shows great numeracy learning as he can learn the concept of shapes, colours, joining pieces that fit together, spatial awareness, counting the number of blocks, understanding portions (fractions) by understanding each block is a part of a whole, learning about height, height and weight correspondence and many more.
10. The girl succeeds in grabbing half of the block tower, but her brother snatches half of that back and adds it back to his own tower. This definitely allows him to learn about how a whole can be broken down into various parts and sizes, and how things can be added and subtracted.
11. The boy 'hits' his sister with the tower but this may merely be accidental and he may have just wanted to show the tower to his sister but estimated wrongly how much he had to reach over.
12. The girl does show signs of hurt but stops before she could actually start crying. She understands that crying is not the only way to express herself and is not necessary in every situation.
13. The girl lifts both her hands and taps them down repetitively. From this she could actually be taught about rhythm and beat, or action songs that involve hand raising.
14. She destroys the tower again but though the boy says 'No, no', he does it with a smile. He may have let his sister ruin the tower on purpose so he could teach her that it is wrong by saying 'No' each time she destroys it.
15. The girl reaches over and takes the tall part of the tower apart twice, but with no hesitation from her brother. He already knows that his action of putting a tall tower in front of his sister will result in her taking it apart.
16. The girl puts the blocks to her mouth but is stopped by her brother screaming 'No'. He may have done this to protect his own toys or to actually prevent his sister from doing something he knows is wrong,
Planning for Further Learning
1. Analyse: Refer to the above running observations
2. Plan: The children can learn about counting, patterning, making different shapes and sizes, building, and can also learn about sharing, respecting, describing his work, making stories and even the role of community members (i.e. the architect, the builder, the engineer)
3. Act/Do: Encouraging the boy to explain his building, asking critical questions about his building, encouraging him to count the number of blocks used. Blocks of different sizes may be introduced or templates with specific patterns and colours may be provided for him to build. Writing his own story about the building and the people who work/live in it, encouraging the boy to think what else he could build with the blocks (i.e. cars, furniture), singing songs that are related to his building.
4. Reflection
From the running observations, I find that the video clearly showed many numeracy and literacy skills. In terms of literacy, both children are at two different stages of language acquisition. The boy is at the toddler stage where he is learning to string together words to make simple phrases, whereas the girl is at the babbling stage where they babble sounds of languages they have heard and unheard (Bardige 2008, p.4). They both clearly understand social cues, understanding that conversations take place between more than one person, and each should take turns in responding to each other, and with a direct purpose of who the message is indicated for. Bardige (2008) notes that to improve children's language and communication skills, it is important for the adults to constantly engage in conversations with the children, use proper language and encourageback-and-forth communication. The girl is also seen to be demonstrating self-corrective empathy whereby she shows empathy in response to her own actions (Quenn & Wien 2006, p. 4). This shows that the girl is definitely in tune with her own feelings and can understand the concept of action and consequence. In terms of numeracy, I believe that blocks are on of the best ways to introduce multiple numeracy concepts to children. As stated in the observations above, children can learn about shapes, colours, sizes, puzzles, joining pieces that fit, fractions, counting, weight, height, patterns and so many more all just from simple blocks. The boy definitely does show a key understanding in putting together pieces and always wanting to form a larger and higher tower.
Bardige, B & Bardige, M 2008, 'Talk to me, baby! Supporting language development in the first 3 years' in Zero to Three, September, pp. 4 - 10.
Quenn, V & Wien, CA 2006, 'The Visible Empathy of Infants and Toddlers' in Beyond the Journal: Young Children on the Web, July, pp. 1-7.
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