Communicating and Learning

3.1 Guiding and teaching

In minority and majority countries, educators debate 'traditional' versus 'progressive' approaches to teaching and learning. Traditional educational approaches emphasize the 'basics' and the acquisition of solid skills through structured direct instruction, pre-established learning goals and measureable results. More progressive approaches focus less on specific skills and knowledge and more on understanding, problem-based learning and projects.

As the following example shows, children's play often offers many opportunities for learning:

Many educators involved in delivering programmes for young children highly value the importance of play. Listen as Abdalla Mjaka, a lead trainer in the Zanzibar Madrasa Resource Centre, explains this.

View >>  CL3_Mjaka1

Educators can take advantage of learning opportunities that emerge AND they can structure learning opportunities into a child's day. Educators can guide learning experiences that are within the range of things children can do both with and without guidance-that is, in their zone of proximal development. The educator supports the children through the problem-solving process, encouraging them to try something new, persist, and find alternative solutions. The educator challenges children to use their observations to predict and draw conclusions, to think about how things work, to think about why something happened, and encourages them to reflect on what they could do differently or change the next time.

Supporting emerging literacy
In the next clip, Janette Pelletier explains that before children can learn to read, they must be able to distinguish sounds within words, recognize letters of the alphabet and connect letters to sounds. She gives examples of ways that we can support children's emerging literacy abilities in a playful and natural way.

View >> CL3_Pelletier1 (3:26)

Pelletier is also interested in how children develop an understanding of print. She describes her research and how children's writing samples change as they acquire the alphabetic principle.

View >> CL3_Pelletier2 (2:09)

Consider the variety in these examples of the words, "Daddy has three hockey sticks", as written by 4-year-olds.

The following video shows wonderful examples of how language, and specifically emerging literacy, is supported in Madrasa preschool programmes in East Africa. The wonder of hearing stories, the stimulating environments, the active learning materials and the encouraging teachers provide many different opportunities to support language and literacy skills.

View >> supporting_language_literacy

Supporting emerging mathematical understanding
Cognitive development theorists such as Jean Piaget believe that young children gradually, through repeated experiences with materials as well as developmental growth, build a conceptual framework which is the basis for mathematical understanding. The kinds of mathematical concepts preschool-aged children can understand are described below.

Read >> Early math concepts: Matching, classification, comparing, and seriation

Preschools and primary schools can build on children's informal, everyday math to develop the concepts, procedures and symbolism of mathematics. An environment rich with objects and materials is a starting point but what is most important is what children do with them.

In the next video, observe how children are building mathematical understanding by playing with simple materials.

View >> Mathematics in the early years