Play-based Learning for Effective Communication
Discuss about the Contributions of Emergent Literacy Skills.
There are several different teaching resources that can be used by educators to impact early childhood education and develop EYLF skills among children. It is to be noted that every child has different experience of belonging, being and becoming due to diversity in family life that results in different expectations, perspectives, knowledge and skills to their learning (Kearns 2010). This makes the learning of children complex and dynamic in nature that needs to be managed right from the age of few months. Educators can help children develop different skills and communication through play-based learning that involve different strategies to make children efficient communicators. Play-based learning allows for the expression of personality and enhances curiosity and creativity among children. This is necessary to help children develop a connection between their prior understanding and new learning leading to development of new relationships and skills (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014). However, it is necessary to understand the strategies and teaching resources that can prove to be effective in meeting the requirements and help children achieve learning outcomes as per the early years learning framework.
Rationale: This resource will help babies and toddlers to develop basic communication skills. Through rhymes babies will develop listening skill, vocabulary of words, and phonemics awareness These skills help them face minimal difficulties in learning to read and more likely to achieve higher in school (Fellows and Oakley, 2014).
Also, according to social interactionist perspective, rhymes are rich source of involving children and other interactively.it is stated that social interactions play a supportive and meaningful learning in language development (Fellow& Oakley,2014, p.51).
Babies and toddlers will learn to understand others (i.e., receptive language) and express oneself (i.e., expressive language) with the use of words, actions and gestures as well as facial expressions (Berk, 2016 and Gardner, 2015).
- Children will enhance their vocabulary.
- children will develop phonemics awareness.
- Children will develop a strong sense of identity (EYLF 1.1)
- Children will feel secure, safe and supported to openly express their feelings and ideas, respond to ideas suggested from others (EYLF 1.2).
- This outcome further focus on helping babies and toddlers develop their emerging autonomy; inter dependence, resilience and sense of agency (EYLF 1.4).
- This outcome will assist children in coming year to develop fine language and communication skills during her early years of development.
- The resources used will be picture cards to help babies develop identify skills. Educator sing song and show them matching picture of animal and ask them to make a sound of animal for example cow, duck etc.
- Introduce different pictures.
- Point at the animal and name them before starting to sing.
- Give turn to children for explore the picture.
- Early childhood educators are an important source of promoting the development of language and communication skills among babies. Here are several practices that are designed to achieve the goals of getting socially connected and communicate better (Machado, 2015).
- The resource can be used to develop through Blank’s level of talk in the first set of questions. Babies and toddlers will listen to the poem, see the pictures and flash cards associated with the poem, go through the text and learn to match colours, shapes, numbers and pictures (Machado, 2015).
- They will further identify the sources of noise and find answers to questions like ‘what can you hear’, ‘who is making that noise’? The poem can also be used to help children name objects (Planning with Kids, 2017).
- They will understand what a farm is, who is an old man, different animals, etc. Further the questions in this level will assist children to learn through activities like naming objects, naming actions, remembering objects pictures in a book thereby developing their initial pronunciation and language skills.
Rationale: The rationale is to help children begin the use of images and approximations of letters and words to convey meaning. they will learn to recognise alphabetic and shapes of different alphabetic.
This will develop basic writing skills and correct formation of alphabets.
This activity can also include practice of writing different alphabets helping children to recognize each alphabet in different writing forms and using them while forming words like their own name (Puranik et al., 2011).
- Children will engage with a range of texts and gain meaning of these texts (EYLF 5.3).
- They learn to express their ideas and make meaning by understanding how symbols and pattern systems work (EYLF 5.3).
- Children use language and engage in play-activities to imagine and create roles, scripts and ideas (EYLF 5.4)
Children will be encouraging to practice writing alphabetic through following arrows directions. It helps children to understand how to write alphabets.
- Encourage children to consider shapes of alphabets
- Encourage children to write different letters in uppercase and lowercase
- Educator model to demonstrate children alphabets sounds and how they need to write.
- Encourage children to write their and family members names
Children will learn about alphabets and sound of alphabets while they are writing. Through this activity children will able to understand connection between printed words and sounds.
This resource will encourage children to write their names. children will also able to understand difference between drawing and writing
Developing Writing Skills
Rationale: Another activity or resource is using painting and sand writing to help children learn about different alphabets and their unique shape. This is also helping to develop imaginary writing It can be inclusive resource for all children for example for the child with autism like to play with sand.
Here, children are asked to write alphabets with their fingers on sand placed in a tray that develop their fine motor skills by helping them link the touch and feel of their fingers with words and alphabets (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014).
- Here again the focus is on developing fine motor skills and promote cognitive development that forms the basis of literacy skills development (EYLF 4.4).
- Children use cognitive skills to develop hand-eye co-ordination through learning the formation of basic lines and curves (EYLF 5.2).
An activity associated with drawing shapes of different alphabets with fingers. Here children will be asked to copy lines and dots to dots matching from given alphabetic paper
- This activity can also be conducted using certain resources focused on pattern writing, tracing shapes and patterns, drawing and colouring, copying lines and dot to dots matching.
- Introduce alphabets using the dots and lines
These skills are necessary to develop future and more complex writing skills among children. Such activities will help children start from the text and moving towards writing their own text.
By scribbling and symbolling which is similar to letter to ‘write’ text in order to represent meaning. The children learn to understand that writing is a type of communication and mark they are making is information. These are foundation skill that help children for good writer later (Fellowes & Oakley,2014, p.369).
Contains: Resources to be used will include story books, white board, projector, laptop, digital format of the story and other associated technological devices
Such methods will help in achieving the aim of making children effective communicators and helping them express their ideas and make meaning of resources available to them in the form of books, media, and technological sources thereby developing investigative ideas and representation skills to present their thinking and views on different subjects and issues.
- Children will develop knowledge in technologies and engage them and make meaning.
- Children will develop their knowledge and skill in storytelling.
- The strategies will help the educators to explore different aspects of teaching multi-literacies, code breaker, functional user, meaning maker, critical analyser and transformer.
- Children become effective communicators through use of information and communication technologies to access information, investigate ideas and represented their thinking (EYLF 5.5).
- The resource is also associated with outcome 4 of early years learning framework where children are expected to become confident and involved learning as they start connecting with people, places and technologies along with the natural things and resources (EYLF 4.4).
- Several different activities can be planned and implemented as teaching strategies using digital technologies. For instance, if an educator wants to promote children’s understanding of gender roles, they might use a relevant story like Cinderella or Goldilocks linking gender differences and stereotyping in the society.
- They can use digital technology to help children identify and capture images of gender stereotyping and the associated issues in the society.
- Further, the educators might engage learning of children with technology by using the images for creating a digital story with actual voice of children use to record their different ideas an understanding about gender roles (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014).
- Further stories like Very Hungry Caterpillar and Bear Gonna Hunt can be used to help children develop reading skills. They may then be aske to describe the story and the message they get from their reading and focusing on the characters of the study.
It will develop literacy skills by focusing on cause and effect relationship, social beliefs and skills of drawing inferences after reading. children will learn skills in storytelling, comprehension and meaning making. Give opportunity to analyse text and media critically. It is helps children to self-regulate that what they learnt and how can they can apply it in range of contexts (Fellowes & Oakley, 2014, pp. 4,5)
Here the focus is on developing learning outcome 5 where children can explore use of literature language in oral as well as written texts through oral telling, role-play, imaginative play and drawing.
This activity will help children acquire skills of contributing to the texts in a collaborative manner and share their ideas and views with each other. This makes them effective communicators where children are able to respond to a range of stimuli and experiment with different ways of presenting their ideas and meanings associated with the text.
- Here again children will be asked to tell their view about the main idea that will help in developing critical thinking skills (EYLF 5.2).
- This will move ahead to help them recognize the characters through pictures, digital media sources and textbooks leading them to summarize the event by sharing their views with each other (EYLF 5.3).
- Small discussions among children after the storytelling session will help generate ideas of effective summarizing leading to achievement of learning outcome 5 to make them effective communicators (EYLF 5.4).
- Resources used will be storybooks and felt board
- Story telling teaching resources in the form of different stories with different messages will help children through various phase of leaning.
- In the first phase, children will be code breaker by learning about phonics, recognizing whole word, morphology and etymology (Mertin and Connor, 2017).
- Next stage of story telling will help children to make meaning of vocabulary as they will learn new words, learn to read and understand comprehension thereby developing schema activation and prediction. This stage is also known as text participation where children will be asked to represent their understanding about the story, use some words from the story to develop small sentences and use these words in their daily interactions with each other (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014).
- Next children will learn to analyse the text by understanding the purpose of author or the exact message that the author tends to give through the story. Here, children can be given the activity of writing down their learning from the story that will help them analyse the event and the associated meaning and message (Lee and Carr, 2012).
- The use of meaning and message in their daily life along with the response and connection with the text to bring in their prior knowledge and communicate with text will make them text user.
- While helping kids to go through the comprehension they will be assisted in moving through a step-by-step process. Here they will start with predicting the story initially after getting an introduction from the teacher. Further they will get to know about the main idea behind the story.
Conclusion
Educators or teachers can help children move in a proper direction as per their age and understanding towards development of early childhood learning skills. It is of utmost importance that the activities for children are planned as per their age, understanding, background, prior knowledge and experiences. This will ensure easy connection and increased participation of children in learning activities leading to achievement of learning outcomes as per EYLF. The learning and development of skills in early childhood influence the life chances of children and influence their wellbeing by developing a strong sense of connection and positive attitude towards different scenarios. This makes it necessary for educators to focus on the concepts of being, becoming and belonging while planning and implementing various educational activities as per the understanding and goals of learning defined for children.
References
Berk, L. (2015). Child Development. Cengage Learning
Commonwealth of Australia (2014). Belonging, Being and Becoming. Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace
Fellowes, J., & Oakley, G. (2014). Language, Literacy and Early Childhood Education. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
Gardner-Neblett and Gallagher, K.C. (2015). More than Baby Talk. FPG Child Development Institute. The University of North Carolina.
Kearns, K. (2010). Frameworks for Learning and Development. SAGE
Mertin, R. and Connor, J. (2017). Learning and Teaching through play. Early Childhood Australia
Lee, W. and Carr, M. (2012). Learning Stories: Constructing Identities in Early Education. SAGE
Machado, J.M. (2015). Early Childhood Experiences in Language Arts. Cengage Learning
Planning with Kids (2017). Blanks Levels of Questioning. Retrieved from: https://planningwithkids.com/2010/03/18/blanks-levels-of-questioning-stimulating-children%E2%80%99s-language-development/
Puranik, C. c., Lonigan, C.J., & Kim, Y. (2011). Contributions of emergent literacy skills to name writing, Letter writing, and spelling in preschool children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 26(4), 465-474.
Turner, B.A. (2017). The Routledge International Handbook of Sandplay Therapy. Routledge.
Yurt, O., & Cevher-Kalburan, N. (2011). Early childhood teachers’ thoughts and practices about the use of computers in early childhood education. Procedia Computer Science, (3). Pp.1562-1570
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