Activities and Observation

Professional Practice Elements Engaged 

National Quality Standards -Quality Area 6 (Collaborative Partnerships with families and community) Community partnerships extend the learning experience to children by enabling them to relate their education to the real world (Halgunseth et al., 2009):  

Standard 6.2 - Collaborative Partnerships: Community Connection:  

  • Arranged an archaeologist visit to be with the child through his/her parent, who works in the museum  
  • Professional Networks: Linked into local historical society as a source to find pure resources  
  • Cultural Partnerships: Invited aboriginal elder to teach knowledge about digging sticks (planned to do next week)  
  • Family Expertise: Several parents donated the artifacts of travels to be checked at station  

Playing with Children and Provision of Playful Opportunities 

Adults entering the play of children must know how to act as drivers of learning without taking over (Wood, 2019):  

Co-construction Play: Timbered children making tunnels underground   

  • Nathan: We must find some means of getting the underground people food!   
  • Me: What do you suppose they would do to be able to get around that?"  
  • Joint Solution: Children figured out elevator systems, subterranean gardens and trade routes  

Scaffolding of Playful Learning:  

  • Open ended questioning: I wonder what would happen were we to...?  
  • Resource supporting: Included resources when children required them to hold their constructions up  
  • Problem-solving guidance: Testing and changing the problem instead of providing answers was stimulated  
  • Documentation involvement: Children assisted in taking photographs of their creations, and describing designs 

Professional Teaching Standards - Standard 5 (Assess, Provide Feedback and Report) 

Teaching practice based on quality assessment practices helps in the process of learning of children (AITSL, 2018):  

5.1 - Assess Student Learning:  

  • Observational assessment: Additional strategies that were observed in problem-solving of children in construction  
  • Self-evaluation: Asked children to review themselves in the concept of learning and difficulties 
  • Peer rating: The children talked about what the other kid created on a construction. 
  • Portfolio assessment: placed additional artifacts and photographs into individual learning portfolios  

5.2 -Furnish feedback: Efficient feedback aims at aiding the children in their learning and inspiration (Hattie & Timperley, 2007):  

  • Absorbing your comments: I saw the fact that you tried three methods of making that tunnel stable.  
  • Descriptive feedback: "Engineering thinking in your design of the elevator would think about pulleys and leverage"  
  • Growth based feedback: You continue to build off yesterday when you found the root, making underground food systems  
  • Peer feedback facilitation: Promoted children to give appreciation about individual pieces of the child.  

Assessment Documentation: Joe was capable of thinking in 3D as he constructed an underground city using tunnels of various levels connected to each other. She was interrogated on design choices, and she shared about how, when I asked, the water tunnels are on top of the food tunnels because in case of a leak, it would irrigate gardens rather than cause a mess. It is evidence of advanced cause-and-effect thinking as well as proactive problem-solving.

National Regulatory Considerations  

The National Quality Framework guarantees the uniformity of quality standards in early childhood services distributed across early childhood services (ACECQA, 2020): Regulation 73 - Educational Program:  

  • Clear learning goals in paper form 
  • Demonstrated weekly addition and development of complexity of the buildings  
  • Illustrated sensitive planning by reference to the emerging interests of children   

Regulation 74 - Child Assessment:  

  • notes taken of each child   
  • Well-identified and evidenced learning outcomes   
  • Documentation language that is family friendly 

Creativity Across the Service and Curriculum Provision 

By providing innovative and critical thinking skills, creative learning environments favor creativity (Davis, 2018): Creative Integration:   

  • Art: Designs in underground cities converted into drawings in architecture  
  • Music: With instruments, children produced the so-called underground sounds  
  • Drama: playing psychodrama, as underground creatures and the people of the city  
  • Literature: made up tales of what went on underground, of mysteries  

Creative Problem-Solving: When they could not stop the tunnels collapsing children would invent:  

  • Wooden block support beams systems  
  • Arches that reinforce more openings in the tunnel  
  • An exterior pain prior to adding on top of it  
  • Sharing engineering consulting dynamics  

Creative Documentation:  

  • Underground cities were plotted by children in the form of architectural plans  
  • To illustrate various parts of underground, invented maps and symbols  
  • Prescribed construction handbooks upon which other builders could adhere to  
  • Created advert posters of Underground City tours