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Show notes
Brighter Thinking Pod, Ep 45: Early Years Teaching and Learning
Cambridge Early Years programme
Cambridge Early Years teaching and learning resources
Developing the Cambridge Learner Attributes
Early Years education: play-based learning and language support
Jemma Joakim: Hello, welcome to our latest episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from the International Education Group of Cambridge University Press and Assessment.
I’m Jemma Joakim, Head of Early Years and Primary Curriculum and I’ll be your host today. Today we’re going to be taking a closer look at Cambridge Early Years and we’ll be hearing from a school that has adopted our programme. They’re going to share their top tips on topics such as play-based learning and language support that you can use in your setting today.
For this episode, we’re joined by two special guests. Firstly, we have Aisha El-Sayed, who is KG Principal from the English Modern School in Qatar. Welcome, Aisha.
Aisha El-Sayed: Thank you so much, Jemma. I’m so happy to be here and I can’t wait to get down into some deep conversations.
Jemma Joakim: Absolutely lovely to have you with us. And secondly, we have Aiah Elghobashy, who is a teaching and learning coordinator also from the English Modern School in Qatar. It’s great to have you both here with us.
Aiah Elghobashy: Thank you so much. We’re really happy to be able to join today and to share what we’ve been able to do at English Modern School here in Qatar.
Most surprising icebreaker
Jemma Joakim: Well, I’m looking forward to getting going and we’re going to start with an ice-breaker ladies to get the episode going and today we’re asking our guests what’s the most surprising thing one of your children has said or done this year? Aisha, would you like to start us off?
Aisha El-Sayed: Yes. So I have to say first that every day is a surprise. You never know. You never know what kind of mood you’re going to get from your little learners. And you have to be ready to help them get through that emotionally. But the latest memory that I have, that one of my KG learners came to school and it was just surprising to everyone. We were just so amazed was when this child came about with his very own learning station all set up.
So he got poster boards, he got papers that we could tell he ripped to make a little sign and everything. And he wanted to have a learning station. So because in our preschool, we have lots of learning spaces designated for you know, whether it’s exploration or whether it’s they want to do role play, he wanted to have his own station with a group of learners that would come up to him and ask him questions. They’re really big on asking questions and inquiry based learning.
And Cambridge supports that with the let’s explore. And he loved doing this. So he had a poster board with stickers and we were talking about animals at that point. So he had lots of stickers with animals on that page. He had questions prepared asking them. So that was just really amazing to see how this child had that student autonomy where he took on that role and it was something that just motivated him. So that was something really, really satisfying to see with this little child.
Jemma Joakim: Absolutely, it’s great to hear such young children taking responsibility for their own learning. Thank you for sharing. Aiah, what about you?
Aiah Elghobashy: Okay, so we’ve recently been wrapping up the year by having our celebration of learning assemblies and in our year one assembly a few of our learners were able to share a reflection of what they couldn’t do in KG2 and what they’ve been able to do now in year one and they spoke about how they couldn’t read in KG2 and now they’re reading books.
And how they couldn’t do certain things on their own in KG2 but now they are able to do it and they spoke about how much more independent they are and they were really able to reflect on the year of learning that they’ve had. And it wasn’t surprising per se but it was really sweet to watch young learners be able to reflect on their own growth and their achievements and how far they’ve come since they’ve been with us in year one.
Jemma Joakim: That’s such a lovely thing to share. Thank you. I think it’s so nice, isn’t it, as educators to be able to see children develop the confidence over an academic year, to be able to stand up and reflect on their own learning. So thanks for sharing those great answers.
How to guide and monitor learners during play
Jemma Joakim: So as we all know, Cambridge Early Years is a child-centred play-based programme, and it really helps young learners to develop at their own pace.
So our first question this morning is, how do you guide and monitor your learners during play? And do you have any tips for our listeners that might be finding this challenging? Let’s start with Aiah for this question.
Aiah Elghobashy: Thank you. So in our earlier environment, we view play as structured freedom. While the children may seem to be freely exploring behind the scenes, we have intentional systems to guide their experiences. So one method we use is play based goal setting, where each area has a subtle learning intention tied to a curriculum goal. And whether it’s developing fine motor skills at the art table or collaboration at the block area, each play area has a clear purpose.
And the way that our teachers plan is they come together and they really talk about what the intention of each station and each center is and what is the purpose behind it. And that’s a really big thing for us. It’s a big step of the process.
And then during free flow and during play, we sort of track, we use tracking sheets to monitor engagement so we can see which centers are more popular, how the kids are engaging with each other and how they’re engaging with the station and is it fulfilling the purpose and the learning intention behind that station.
And rather than immediately intervening, teachers practice strategies of sort of stepping back and only stepping into gently nudge or to question or to prompt and sort of allowing the learners to take the lead in those situations. And we found that that’s worked quite well.
And then you mentioned a tip that I have for our listeners. So a tip I’d say is to try to set up the space like an invitation to learn, not overly busy or overwhelming. So select fewer high quality materials that engage that open-ended questioning and then rotate them quite regularly as well. So we found that less is truly more when it comes to setting up your stations and setting up the learning centers for students.
Jemma Joakim: That’s so interesting. Thank you. I think it’s really key to hear there about the role of the teacher, the practitioner, sort of working alongside the children and sort of how important they are, how important a resource they are in terms of responding to what’s happening within the situation, how to wonder, how to question.
And I really like how you’re talking about the teaching conversations that you’re having as a team and how you’re collaborating on next steps by observing the children there. Thank you. That’s really, really helpful. Aisha, have you got any thoughts on guiding and monitoring and working alongside children during play?
Aisha El-Sayed: Yes, so I can add and build up upon what Aiah mentioned. So guiding and monitoring learners at this age, that’s very important. And that’s how you know you’re having a successful play-based learning. Because yes, we want the children to be able to play. They need to explore. And a child will not know what they’re capable of doing if we don’t give them that freedom. So it’s so important to have that freedom. And that builds upon what we actually did. We incorporated the Cambridge Early Years, and we introduced something called free flow.
And free flow is their favorite time of the day. Every time we have them in the morning. What time is free flow? What time is free flow? So they enjoy this because when it is free flow, we have all of our KG2 learners come together and they get to visit different learning spaces. And these learning spaces are carefully designed the way Aiah mentioned. It’s carefully designed to help our students with skills that they need to develop. So we’ve got a station with exploration. We’ve got role play. We’ve got our blocks.
Sensory station is just the most popular station. They’ve got stations with construction. They’ve got stations mark making area. So all of these stations are carefully designed to help develop the skills that they need at that stage. Now all of our learners develop differently and we know that. The job of our teachers are to make sure that they’re observing the learners to see what area they like, what area they feel that is not popular, what area is helping the child to develop further.
And then they take that all into consideration. And that’s where the teamwork and collaboration comes into. The reason why that I’m bringing up the free flow is because yes, it’s play-based, but it’s teaching our learners how to be self-directed learners, self-regulation. And this is something that’s very important that we want to instill in our young learners, especially, we want them to be independent. A tip that I do have for teachers would be when you want your children to have this free flow or have learning spaces, what’s important is that you have that conversation with them. Come up with agreements. And they’re very good at making agreements. They will give you a whole list of what they think are the things that they need to do. They enjoy coming up with agreements. And let them explore. Give them the opportunity to explore. Make a mess. Get familiar with the materials that’s happening.
Some learners prefer having color coded ideas around or labels around just so that they could familiarize. Okay, red, I want to go to the red station. That’s my music station. Other learners just need time. They like it because it’s also developing that social aspect. So they’ll, you know, it’s funny when you see that them come together and be like, free flow, you and I are going to go to this room. Then that conversation happens. So when we think about the play-based learning, we’re looking at the child holistically and how we can develop all of those skills.
And the last point I do want to mention is when we have the play-based learning, we get to incorporate our Cambridge learner attributes. That’s something that we really have that conversation with the students about. And it’s amazing seeing this young learners talk about, I want to be confident today, or I’m going to be responsible. And going back to what Aiah mentioned about our learners at the end of the year, they know, they said, we were reflective learners today. So I think it’s just amazing to see how it’s all coming into play.
Jemma Joakim: Absolutely. Thank you both for such comprehensive answers there. That’s really insightful. And I think just to pick up on a couple of things that you were talking about, Aisha, in terms of sort of observing the children in the space. I think that’s great. We’ve got the whole discover, decide, do approach that we look at in assessment and you’re really sort of picking up on that by observing what they’re doing and then thinking about next steps and discussing it with the children and involving them in their learning because I think that’s so important. They feel part of the space that they’ve contributed. They have some ownership over the space as well and that’s really, really important. Thank you. Those tips are so helpful for our listeners.
How do you support different language levels in your classroom?
Jemma Joakim: So we’re going to move on now. Our Early Years programme also supports a bilingual approach to education for those learners with a home language other than English. And so our next question is, how do you support different language levels in your classroom? Aiah, what’s your thoughts on this?
Aiah Elghobashy: So this is a really big area for us because we have many, many students that come to us from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some of them come in with a little bit of English. We have students that come in with no English at all. And so this has been a big focus for us in recent years. So in our classrooms, language development is woven into everything that we do. And we believe that consistent exposure and repetition are key.
We sort of intentionally narrate actions and you’ll see teachers narrating their actions and their activities throughout the day, almost like writing a running commentary for students. So the children are consistently hearing your vocabulary used in that meaningful real world context. For example, a child building a tower, a teacher might say, you’re placing a blue block on top of a red block and the tower is getting taller and taller. And we just do that consistently because we believe the more we expose them to the vocabulary in context, the easier it will be for our students that are coming in from this wide variety of backgrounds.
So repetition is another essential strategy. We repeat key phrases, we have routines and instructions, we give multiple times, we use consistent language, which is obviously really helpful. Teachers will use gestures and visual supports. And we found that this helps our children, especially at that early stage of English acquisition, to make those strong, confident connections between words and meanings.
We also embed language naturally into play. So we encourage children to talk while they’re playing, to talk about what they’re doing and what they’re seeing and to interact with each other. So you’ll see when you come in to our classrooms and the students are at their different stations, they’ll be talking to each other and they’ll be saying, ‘the car is moving on the track’. And the teacher might go up and say, ‘can you tell me what color the car is?’ ‘The car is blue.’ So ‘the blue car is moving on the track’ and so on. So we try to expand those sentences for the students or least model expanding them for the students and then have them repeat, which we’ve also found has worked quite well for our students.
Jemma Joakim: Fantastic, thank you. I really wanted to just pick up there on the modelling. I think that’s so important and that you’re modelling in front of the children, but then also encouraging them to continue those sorts of conversations and that approach with their friends and their peers whilst they’re playing. So I think that’s a really effective strategy. Thank you, Aiah. Aisha, have you got anything further to add?
Aisha El-Sayed: Yeah, I think this is such a fantastic question because it’s so important with the setting that we have our dynamic, our student dynamic. We’re very diverse, very international. We have students coming from all backgrounds. Their first language is not English. So that’s a challenge we have. But it’s amazing to see how adaptive these young learners are. It’s amazing to see when they start off with us, they don’t have one word of English. At the end, it’s like the parents are like, my gosh, they’re teaching us, they’re helping us to translate at home. And it’s very important because in the early years, we really give a supportive environment for the children. We help to model, as I have mentioned, that modeling and that pointing and repeating and say: can you say good morning? How are you? And they repeat that back again and they will have that conversation. And it’s amazing to see how they pick that up.
For us, we’re very big with videos, dancing and singing. So that helps them a lot when they see those visuals, those pictures, and then we have next to it, we’ve got the translation for them in English and whatever is their native language. And they’re able to just pick that up, visuals all around for them. And it’s amazing because we have children that can memorize a full song in English and they’ll go back home and sing that song with the parents. And they’re like, can you please share that link? They sing the song and I’m not sure what it’s about. So it’s amazing to see how these children just quickly adapt and they pick up with the language.
Visuals are important, videos as well, echoing understanding. So when we say something and we ask them to repeat it, and then we show a visual for it, that becomes a habit for them every single day. Your morning routine is so important. That circle time you have with your children, those conversations you have with them, because that’s where you get to really focus with your learners and they make those connections. So that’s very, very important.
Gestures are important, for example, when they enter and they have self-registration, we ask them: who’s here? Who’s at home? And we point to the name of the student with the pictures, for example, we’ll be like, okay, where is this student today? And they start memorizing the students names. So just doing very, very, you know, small activities with them, but make it fun, make it play-based, make it look like you’re actually playing a game, but not really learning. That’s what, that’s what helps these students to be able to grasp that, that language.
Jemma Joakim: Your learning environments sound amazing, full of laughter and songs and dancing and I think I really want to come and visit.
Aisha El-Sayed: You are welcome anytime! You’ll definitely get a good exercise in!
Jemma Joakim: Brilliant, and it just sounds so positive in terms of how your teachers, your practitioners, educators, we all have different names, but are sort of playing alongside the children as well. And I just think that’s really important, isn’t it, in terms of that modelling piece and they’re seeing what you’re doing and they’re following your lead and then repeating that themselves.
So thank you, that’s really, really interesting.
What resources do children enjoy the most?
So we’ve sort of touched briefly there on the learning environment and it is so important, the learning environment in early years and how it’s set up is crucial.
So in terms of our recommendation from Cambridge, we suggest that schools or early years centres set up what we call continuous provision areas and that these areas should always be available to the young learners in the classroom and can include things like a reading corner, a role play area, which we tend to suggest is a home, a home corner, construction, sand and water, all of those sorts of things. So with that in mind, our third question for our guests today is what resources are your children most enjoying using at the moment and which areas of provision are the most popular with your learners?
Because effective continuous provision means that children can use and manipulate resources across the learning environment so they’re not sort of static within the areas. So Aisha I’m going to come to you first on this so what resources are they most enjoying and which areas provision do they go to most?
Aisha El-Sayed: That’s a really great question that you asked, but I think it would be really hard for me to limit only two or three of the learning spaces that they do enjoy because it’s all of our stations are popular with our learners because as you mentioned, this continuous provision, it’s there to meet their needs and it’s there to help them. So these students are able to explore on their own independently and there’s so many materials and resources that they use that they enjoy.
So I’ll give you an example, like our sensory area, my goodness. This sensory area is a huge hit. I have shaving foam set up. We’ve got colorful shaving foam that was something I didn’t even know existed, but it’s like a paint foam now that’s amazing. And they have like measuring cups, they’ve got ice cream scoops and they’ve got sand and water. And then it’s amazing to see how they come together and just mix all of these and they will create things on their own. And you know, that really, that’s really important because they’re developing sensory, they’re developing tactile, they’re developing their vocabulary, the way that they’re expressing themselves.
I just want to share with you something about one of my learners the other day. So shaving foam for the first time when a child saw it, we were spraying it down and he just put up his hand and he thought about it for like a split second if he’s going to lick it or not. And it was so funny because he was like, ‘mommy uses this for cakes’. I’m like, ‘no, no, no, this is completely different!’ So it was amazing that exploration and that, you know, where they have to explore, they have to test this out.
And then they went home and explained to their parents about this, explained to their other friends. So our sensory is just, it’s a huge hit. Making their own Play-Doh, that’s a huge hit as well. And I’ll give you a secret ingredient. Teachers, cream of tartar, your Play-Doh is going to be amazing. So just make sure that you do follow the recipe and research about cream of tartar. It’s amazing.
Jemma Joakim: Great tip. Thank you.
Aisha El-Sayed: The construction zone, that’s always buzzing. We always have our learners trying to build these massive towers and these massive construction things where they’re going to try to fit under it or try to sit on it. So it’s amazing. And we built something with the learners where we told them what a blueprint was and they have to draw their plan out. And then they went to the construction zone and the magnetic blocks and they tried to picture what their house would look like or they picture what animal homes would look like and they made that connection. The dress up area, that’s a popular one for boys and girls. They love this. They love dressing up. And some of them will dress up as their teachers. And it’s amazing to see from a four year old how they look at their teacher, the words they would say and the way they repeat. And I’m like, wow. So I sound like that?!
So two areas that I do want to talk about that we’ve added was our innovative area and our mindful area. So our mindful area is where we have our reading area, but we put meditation music for them. We’ve got our calm down area. We’ve got belly breath breathing, breathing posters, and our kids just love this area for some, some of the students, they need that calm down and some students prefer that. So this area is very popular for us. We put meditation music.
We had an amazing activity about water. So one of the blocks was about water from Cambridge curriculum. And we had meditation music of water, you know, just, just the water waves, water ripples going, and they had black cardboard, a paint brush where they’re dipped in water and they took this paint brush and they just made marks on it, just feeling the music. And then later they were, they were amazed to see that, it’s all gone. It all dried up. just small learning.
You know, they’re making learning exploration and their wonders are getting out there, the questions that they explore. And our last one is innovative. The innovative, they love this. They have all kinds of crafts available. Anything that they need from recyclable, from colorings, ⁓ know, toilet rolls. And they just sit there and they make these amazing contraptions. And you’re like, wow, tell me more about this and the conversations that they get going. So it’s just really amazing. think if you just give these young learners the right tools, they will really really just impress you with what they can do.
Jemma Joakim: It sounds absolutely magical in your setting and I think I would want to all of my time in the night. I’m totally Zen.
Aisha El-Sayed:
Well, anytime. It is, it is. And you know, and they know it’s just amazing when you see them, when you talk about, all right, mindful breathing. It’s amazing to see that they get in this position and they, you know, crisscross and their hands are there and they’re just closing their eyes and breathing, or some are putting their hands on their heart breathing. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to see that, you know, they just, they know what it means. We had an amazing week about children’s mental health.
And they were a part of that where, you know, we have to do these mental, mental well-being. We’ve got to do belly breathing. We’ve got to meditate. We’ve got to count. And parents were involved with that and parents were like, can we just have sessions for us? We need this in our life as well. It was, no, it’s, it’s, it’s been amazing with the learners and amazing journey and Cambridge curriculum really looks at the child holistically. And it’s been, it’s been such a great guide for us.
Jemma Joakim: that’s so good to hear. And I think what’s so lovely about hearing you discuss these different areas in the classroom is how in one area, there’s sort of almost a provocation to explore in a different way. So you talked about sort of the wave movements and how one child was then representing that through paints and exploring that. So you’ve kind of got the link there with the creative expression. And that’s just just so lovely that they’re able to be familiar with the learning environment, be comfortable in the learning environment.
They’ve had such positive modeling from the staff working in the learning environment. So they feel confident to be able to move resources where they would like to and to create what they want and use their own initiative and their sense of independence. Yeah, no, that’s fantastic.
Aiah Elghobashy: Exactly.
Jemma Joakim: Aiah, over to you. What resources do you find that most enjoying at the moment?
Aiah Elghobashy: I think I have to agree with what Aisha said. You know, she started off by saying the sensory corner is so popular and that’s something that we’ve definitely found has carried on throughout the year. So no matter which part of the year we’re in, that is a station that children just kind of gravitate towards. But then we’ve got so many stations and areas set up in our continuous provision that they do tend to explore the others as well.
Another one that was quite popular when the weather was good, not so long ago when the weather was better here in Qatar a few weeks ago was our garden corner. So we set up the garden corner and it completely captured the students’ imagination and their hearts. So we had set it up with many planters and seeds, soil, watering cans and gardening gloves and they got so involved and so into it and it was just really cute to see the little ones all around the garden corner and they started planting seeds and they were watching their tiny little seed sprout and for a child to see that it’s just it’s so magical for them and it’s really magical for us to watch them as well discover how plants grow. It connected really well with the units that we were doing and our approach in the early years is we take an inquiry-based approach that fits really, really nicely. And what we found as well with the Cambridge curriculum is that we’re able to take that and use that inquiry based-approach or apply that inquiry based approach to the curriculum, which has just worked really, really wonderfully for us this year.
Jemma Joakim: That was great to hear about sort of outdoor learning in the early years as well. I know that that is unfortunately a real challenge in some of our settings due to the weather being either really too hot or very cold. But when you can get out there, having those opportunities, that sort of free flow between the indoors and the outdoors and for children to explore is so amazing because they’re naturally curious about the natural world, aren’t they? And so that sounds like an amazing opportunity. Well, I can’t believe it, but that’s all we have time for today on our second Early Years episode. Thank you so much, Aisha and Aiah, for being such fantastic guests and sharing some really useful insights for our listeners.
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